W500 "Display driver failed to respond but has recovere

[KennethG]

After a few cycles of this message, the system crashes and reboots itself. This occurs for sure when I change the display theme, but happens under other instances as well.

Has anyone else encountered this problem?

I assume all W500 are fitted with the ATI Mobility FireGL 5700. A driver for it doesn't seem to be available, and the driver pre-loaded on the W500 is for the ATI Mobility Radeon 3650.

Are they fully compatible? I have talked to 5 different Lenovo tech support folks, 3 of which were from a team dedicated to the "W" series. One of the tech folks told me there is no driver available for that display and even pointed me to download a display driver for the R500.

Nothing has worked and I am about to return the unit. This is the 2nd W500. The first one had a different problem.

Any suggestions are appreciated.

Ken

[Paul386]

I have gotten this same problem on my desktop PC with a Nvidia 8800GT and a ATI 4870. I haven't quite pinned down the source but I think that it is actually caused by my ICH10R southbridge. This is because at the same time I get the spam of "Your Display Driver has stopped working and has recovered" message I hear clicking coming from my hard drives and a slight "pause" in the computer.

I certainly hope the W500 isn't using Radeon drivers. I was going to purchase one for heavy CAD use (using this 2 day sale price), but if they are sporting Radeon, and Radeon only, drivers than it will be useless to me!

[ZPrime]

The drivers are Dual-purpose Radeon/FireGL. The ID information in the INF file for the V5700 is wrong and it is being mis-reported to Device Manager as a Radeon 3650, but if you open the ATI tools it shows that you are running a FireGL system (there's a big logo in the corner that says so).

It's just an INF problem. If they correct it, they'd have to re-submit the driver for validation and signing (otherwise Windows would complain it's an unsigned driver) so that's probably why they haven't touched it.

I've had the same issue on Vista x64 and I was thinking it might be the 64-bit OS, but I guess not if you're seeing it as well.

[jmshep]

I saw the same thing today on Vista biz64, minus the automatic reboot, since I've got that turned off. It happened during target OS installation while setting up a sandbox for a server using Virtual PC 2k7. I figured it was due to the fact that I was running it in the background, while doing something else in the host system. I haven't tried to replicate it though.