This weekend took me to hell and back. On Thursday, my system encountered a “display driver nvlddmkm stopped responding and has successfully recovered” issue, followed shortly after with a screen lock and then finished off with a BSOD!

Needless to say, that came out of nowhere. No sign of issues beforehand or anything; practically a case of spontaneous combustion in a way. So after the BSOD, it tries to reboot, but starts showing signs of having trouble loading up Vista. I had to power off the system manually. This was when I went to work:

I yanked off the power cord, unplugged my monitors, opened up the computer, grabbed my compressed air can and blew out all the dust. I then pulled out the video card, sprayed off all the dust everywhere I could imagine and put everything back together. System rebooted fine and the problems went away for the night and I filed it away as an isolated incident. Little did I know that it was going to be much, much worse than I thought.

The next morning, fired up WoW, and I immediately get an error, the game locks up and my computer locks up. This was when I knew I had a problem. I didn’t have time to deal with as I was off to work, but when I got back, it was just constant “nvlddmkm” problems. Researching for solutions lead to dead ends as this problem has been around since 2007!!! What the fuck? 2007? Yes, 2007. At that point, I knew I was screwed.

Hours and hours into Friday night I go and no workable fix is available. So by now, it has moved on from an isolated incident to possibly a software issue. I wasn’t ready to call this a hardware failure, but I already made up my mind to be ready to go get a new video card just in case. Being 3:00AM in the morning, I called it quits until the next day.

Didn’t get much sleep at all. I was already up at 6:30 trying to find more solutions. The condition of the problems worsened by the hour. It wasn’t just affecting my gaming, it started affecting all aspects of my displays, even in idle mode, and all the way to when the system was just booting. I continued looking into nvlddmkm issues, but still no solutions. I kept looking, but nothing. So I decided it was time to try out a new video card. Along with this decision, I decided to quickly backup all my computer’s data. I had a feeling I was going to need a full computer format before all this is over.

I grabbed myself a new 9800GTX+ PCI-E. I quickly realized that I made a mistake. I didn’t look into the kind of powering I needed to run the new card. I plugged it in, but there was no way my current system could handle it. I was missing a 6-pin PCI-E power cord from my PSU. Not to mention, the card needed 450W to run, my PSU maxed out at 300W.

I repacked the video card and considered returning it. In the meantime, I went with my final option, which was to format my computer. If this was absolutely a software issue, a reformat will reset everything. Success on my side? Not at all. The issues affected the reinstall process, and crashed almost immediately when I started up WoW. I wasted the rest of my day reading about everyone else’s problems while noticing a steady, gradual decline of my video card. It was like watching someone’s health falter over time. It didn’t help at all that it was the onstart of Daylight Savings, effectively removing 1 hour of the precious weekend time.

Before I slept, I made the decision that I will try to get a new PSU with proper wiring and retry the new video card. Woke up early the next day, bought a new 500W PSU, got back, ripped out the old power supply, stuck in the new one and tested it out. Everything booted, so it was time for the new video card. Plugged everything in, boot fails. I remained calm and attempted a new Vista install. Success!

Everything was going smoothly at this point. Install was fine and no graphical glitches on the screen. Powered up WoW again, and it remained stable. I even went and got myself a pizza and let the game run. Everything fine when I got back. 2 minutes into me running around… and BAM.. screen fucks up and computer locks up. I was frustrated beyond comprehension. Did I diagnose the issue wrong? Was it my RAM that was causing the problems? My MOTHERBOARD?! Anything but the mobo, please.

Rebooted the machine, and decided to install the latest drivers. I didn’t get an nvlddmkm issue during the lock up, so I figured that it could possibly be a case of old drivers. Installed the new drivers and, to my surprise, that ultimately fixed the problem.

In conclusion, it was not a software issue. My RAM and Mobo were fine. It came down to hardware failure of my video card. And in true computer issue resolution, I threw money at the problem to make it go away. A new video card and a new power supply and now I am a happy camper once again. It even made me backup my files and format my computer. So everything is fresh and clean again. It only cost me some 2+ days of my life and close to $300, which I could’ve spent on a netbook =( . But I have my system back and that’s all that matters.

(And this my first post of the year. How distracted I have become due to WotLK.)