I just received my computer back from servicing of friday (last friday) and I formatted it on sunday as I was instructed to by Pioneer. I was having huge problems with vidoes/movies freezing and me needing to reboot and I was suffering real bad gaming perfrmance (compared to usual). They upgraded my BIOS to 1.5 whilst it was in service.

So I formatted and reinstalled windows and I installed the drivers in order (as instructed in the manual) and I decided to play GTA San Andreas. After about an hours worth of gameplay it decides to freeze, after alt-ctrl-del a popup appears saying 'windows has suffered and recovered from a device failure, please reboot to return to normal'. So after placing all my ATI settings back to default and reducing hardware acceleration, and finding little difference (By now it freezes within minutes), so I decide to reformat and reinstall it as instructed on the manual once more. I found no difference.

So what can I do to resolve this issue without having to send it cross country for the computer's thrid sevice in 10 months?

Try using mobility modder (www.driverheaven.net) to modify and install the latest ATI Catalyst driver set.

If that doesn't work try propping the back of the laptop up to increase air flow to the MB/Video card to reduce potential heat issues.

If that doesn't work do some searching for new drivers for the other components in the laptop. For instance for my D470K laptop Gigabyte has a much newer driver on their website for the WiFi card than Sager/Pro-Star/Eurocom does. Ditto for the Audio and Network card drivers which are made by Realtek. It may be a different driver causing the lockup.

If that doesn't work try another similarily taxing game (Battlefield 2, Everquest 2, City of Heroes, Halflife 2...) and see if it also locks up.

Hope this helps...

Thanks heaps m8, I do habitually prop my laptop up a bit, I usually use a book or something to give it a couple of inches of breathing space. But i'll try that new driver (can you link me) and I will tr the following:

Via hyperion 4.55
Realtek lan driver 6.20
realtek ac97 driver 3.69
mobility hacked catalyst 5.2

The 5.7 catalysts are hackable I believe.

Go to http://www.ati.com and get the latest driver

then

Go to http://www.driverheaven.net and get the mobility modder.

If the 5.7 Catalysts don't work right for you the Omega Drivers are at http://www.omegadrivers.net/

Finally the Realtek audio drivers are at version 3.74, the LAN drivers are at 6.21 (http://www.realtek.com.tw/) and the the Via drivers are at 5.00 (www.viaarena.com). Might want to update them as well...

Hope this helps

Ronin

Lets see

Well Call of Duty - United Offensive ran a little better, it didn't lock up afer 1 1/2 hours of gameplay, however when explosions and shell shock occured, the whole screen went wacko and it looked as if I was running the game at 256 colours, and it was real choppy. Wierd...

btw can you please link me to the Wfi driver from Gigabyte?
Also, in our model notebooks, do they usee mobile or normal 64 bit chips?

*chuckle* driver linking at your service sir

Seriously it's not a big deal - the link is:

http://www.giga-byte.com/Communicati..._GN-WIAG01.htm

I had ALL kinds of problems with the D470K locking up if I was using the WiFi card to transfer large amounts of data until I updated the Gigabyte WiFi card drivers to this version. it'll still do it from time to time (buggy Atheros Drivers) but is "livable" I guess.

As for COD - I don't play COD so I can't comment on why this might be happening with just COD but I will make one more, hopefully helpful, comment on Video drivers.

Another tool you'll find a link to on www.driverheaven.net is a tool called Drivercleaner Pro. You may want to download this tool and follow the reasonably simple instructions for cleaning the ATI drivers then reinstall the modified ATI drivers and see if that cures your problem.

Hope this helps.

Well I tried the Omegas and they are a LOT better, I do have one little glitch but I think a clean install should fix that. I just wanted to check if the D470K (4750) uses a normal 64 bit CPU or a 64 Mobile CPU?

I might see how the official Catalyst 5.7 mobile drivers work...

Try turning down the volume. I ran my sound at full volume as I work in a noisy environment and found that everything I did was choppy and horrible then I went home and turned the volume off as people were asleep and suddenly it ran smooth!! I have no idea why but I can replicate this at will with the FN keys ingame etc.

Also the d470k can be either desktop (not advised as they kill the battery life) or mobile processors as long as they are 754