Switching full screen freezes computer

[jwinc7]

I am running an Alienware laptop, an M17-R1 with dual ATI Mobility Radeon HD 3870 video graphics cards running in a crossfire x configuration. Each card has 512MB of RAM. The operating system is Windows 7 64 bit. The driver version for the video cards is 8.850.0.0 dated 4/19/2011. I have not been able to find newer drivers and this happened with previous drivers also. The processor is an Intel Core 2 Extreme CPU Q9300 running at 2.53GHz. I have 4GB of RAM.

Here is my problem: If i start a full screen application, the screen will initially flash rapidly with horrid colors. I have to press alt+tab to get out of the application and the go back into it to get correct video and color display. I have to do this within the first minute or two of starting the application. If I wait too long, or if I have to get out of the application at any other time, the computer will freeze up and stop responding all together. After going back into a game and the computer freezing, I have attempted to let the computer sit for a little over two hours while I was out taking care of other things and it had not done anything. I have to do a hard boot on the computer. The computer does this with games that use heavy resources such as Borderlands, and games that are not nearly as resource intensive such as Peggle. I am able to view DVDs in full screen and switch back and forth with no problems.

I have not seen anything in the application or system logs indicating what might be causing the problem. As a test I ran Peggle to purposely make the system crash and here are the last two entries in the application log prior to the crash:
"The Desktop Window Manager was unable to start because composition was disabled by a running application"
"A request to disable the Desktop Window Manager was made by process (Peggle Deluxe)"

The last two system log entries are approximately two minutes prior to the crash and state:
"The Multimedia Class Scheduler service entered the running state."
"The Software Protection service entered the stopped state."

Is this something that can be fixed, or do I just have to accept that once I switch out of a full screen application that I cannot run anything else full screen until I reboot?

 

[DrB0b]

Have you tested any hardware? Stress test/benchmark on the video cards? SFC /SCANNOW and CHKDSK /R from teh command prompt?

Learning - A never ending quest for knowledge usually attained by being thrown in a situation and told to fix it NOW.

 

[rclarke250]

Are you running the drivers from the alienware website for your configuration? If not, I would try that first. Many times the laptop manufacturer runs firmware, and special drivers for that firmware on their configuration, that is not part of the universal drivers by the chipset maker.

 

[linney]

When did this problem start to occur, have you always had such a problem?


Are your Display Resolutions the Default settings for your machine?

Here are some rough notes on Accelerated Graphics for you to peruse.

For IE9, the workaround is to turn off hardware acceleration in IE's Internet Option page. Go to the Advanced tab and check the first option: Accelerated graphics, Use software rendering instead of GPU rendering.



Use the Vista instructions in this article (if you can). Not all Video Cards have this setting available. For example my Nvideo Card doesn't.

How to change the graphics hardware acceleration setting in Windows

http://navozhdeniye.narod.ru/263391.htm

See if your Video Card will allow you to try the Acceleration and Rendering settings mentioned in this article.

Certain kinds of video content do not play after you apply a windowless skin such as the Revert skin to Windows Media Player

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/938920/en-us

 

[jwinc7]

I have had the problem for about a year and a half. Though I have attempted some troubleshooting on my own and researched a little, I have not put a lot of serious effort into it, partly because I was deployed to the desert for a while. I have downloaded and re-installed the video drivers several times. I have downloaded the drivers from Alienware's and AMD's site.

With the advice from another forum, I decided to try and disable one card at a time to see if it was a single card causing problems. In the past when I have deleted and re-installed the drivers, I have never done it one at a time. When I disabled one of the cards the computer started freaking out saying that there were no ATI drivers installed, even though the second card showed it was working fine. The resolution would only get to a max of 1600x1200. I rebooted to see if that would fix the resolution and that is when I received the error the ATI drivers were not installed. I let Windows go get and install the drivers and when it did so, it re-enabled the first card. I rebooted and since then I have not been able to reproduce the problem.

Just out of curiosity, does anyone have an idea as to what the problem might have actually been? Other than the fact that the two video cards act together as one, I am not extremely familiar with exactly how crossfire-x works. Does one card act as a primary and the other as a secondary? If so, is it possible that when I disabled one the other took over as primary therefore fixing the problem?

I am going to re-install Borderlands and see if I can get the computer to run a little hot and recreate the problem just to verify that it is truly fixed and not just temporarily working.

Thank you for all the help!