T61 and Stuttering and Crashing

[SaskFellow]

I pulled out the Crystal HD a bit ago, so I should update my sig. I've got Windows 10 installed, updated every driver in it.

Under Netflix, I get a minute or two of smooth playback, and then suddenly the video starts to stutter but the audio is mostly fine. I've had it end up bluescreening or just hard locking. Using MSI Afterburner, the smooth playback seems to be tied to the GPU clocking up and down, then when it starts to stutter the GPU clocks stop changing and just lock at their maximum speeds.

Oddly before playback FB usage is at 30-42% then dives on playback to 4% then climbs to 24% and when it's stuttering it's jittering between 8-19%

VID usage hits 30% when the stuttering happens then climbs to 69%

Utilization limit shows spikes that correspond to the clock drops and when the clocks stay maxed the Utilization Limit sits at 0.

CPU usage spikes to 100% at the beginning but drops down to about 20% across both cores when the stuttering happens.

CPU temps are in the 40'C range but drop to the mid 30s when it's stuttering.

GPU tops out at 55'C, it did hit 59'C when playing back 1080P Flash streaming video.

GPU memory usage goes up to 125MB, and at desktop is around 64MB.

RAM usage is at climbs about 500MB to 1939MB while its a stuttering mess, and when I stop/shut off Netflix it drops to 1424MB, then drops to 1261MB of usage out of 8192MB available.

Pagefile usage does the same climbs to 2422MB, and when I stop and shut off Netflix, it drops to 1898MB

The GPU clocks are still locked, but the CPU is bouncing happily between 780Mhz and 2.5Ghz.

Oh blue screen of death watching Netflix to see what the CPU does. After reboot GPU clocks are back to down.

System error is: nmi_hardware_failue

Sigh...

I removed the Power Manager, because I read it could cause problems, I disabled Rapid mode on my SSD because it did make things much MUCH worse.

Shouldn't the GPU borrow ram from the system memory pool, rather than being hard limited to the 128MB of frame buffer? It definitely seems like the GPU is cache thrashing.

The same thing has happened again, after watching Netflix the GPU won't clock down, but the VID drops.

The GPU clocks are Core/Shader/Memory:

Idle: 182/365/100
Mid: 297/594/301
Max: 432/864/602

Any helpful hints?

[RealBlackStuff]

Dump W10 and go back to W7-Pro/SP1.

[SaskFellow]

Dump W10 and go back to W7-Pro/SP1.

This is what I suspected... Ugh... Reinstalling...

This T61 has been through a few OSes... XP Pro -> Vista Ultimate -> W7-Ultimate(With XP-Mode) -> W10...

Sucks because my parents HP Elitebook of similar vintage, is so much better under 10...

[brchan]

Windows 7 is the only Windows OS I would put on a T61. Don't bother with Windows 8 either. I tried it and the system ran much hotter than W7 and crashed often (this was about a year after W8 was released). I read somewhere that linux actually has better support for the old X3100 intel gpu in T61 models. You could try test driving a 'live' linux distro to see if you like it over windows. Most distros are fast and none need to run antivirus.

[ajkula66]

There are several threads on NBR where people have reported a plethora of problems on various systems running W10 with nVidia graphics, some of them causing hardware failures.

I'm not sure why one would want to move from an OS that runs dead stable on the given hardware - W7 - to unchartered territories of W10 but to each their own.

[SaskFellow]

Typical... Nvidia... They dumped all support for the GPU's in these systems, and left us with broken drivers under W10...

I like to be adventuresome, on some things, that HP was my first sacrifice, and then my Dell tablet. Both run 10 pretty good, but the tablet is definitely warmer.

Guess once my semester is over, I'll have to kick this thing back to 7. I've managed to sort out every other problem except this one, and it's truly a butt licker.

Edit:

Suspicious, the Win7/8/8.1 driver download file is exactly the same size as the Windows 10 download. It wouldn't be the first time Nvidia wrappered a driver to force install it into a newer OS. They pulled this crap with Vista.

[ajkula66]

Suspicious, the Win7/8/8.1 driver download file is exactly the same size as the Windows 10 download. It wouldn't be the first time Nvidia wrappered a driver to force install it into a newer OS. They pulled this crap with Vista.

It's quite possible that the driver itself is same across the board for W7/8/10...however, the operating environment is vastly different between these...

I doubt that nVidia is trying to push a Windows-related update at this time. Haven't noticed anything unusual on any W7 machines that I own or support. Having said that, all of these have WU completely disabled.

[SaskFellow]

I wouldn't be surprised if the driver performs just fine under W7, but under W10, it's definitely having problems rolling the clock speeds back.

I tried running the Lenovo GPU test, and it keeps failing out claiming a driver problem.

If you read the release notes, they don't talk too much about how different W10 is for graphics, but there are things about how Optimus doesn't function like it used to, because the GPU that's physically connected to the device, retains control over the display and the display driver for can no longer take it over.

I ended up rolling Netflix back in display quality, and it's behaving much better, but the GPU still clocks up to it's mid speed, and won't drop back down, until I reboot the machine.