Omega drivers and probs with my laptop

curzondax

Apparently laptops, or at least this 2 year old toshiba, doesn't like its cooling system tampered with.

For a few weeks the system was fine, but after a night of seti@home (that shows a light 3d screensaver) the system started acting weird:

Random lockups out of nowhere, BSODs with random errors; at first I thought it was Windows, I tried reinstalling XP, even running an Ubuntu live CD but apparently the lockups were still happening.

After a few hours of cooling the system would turn on again and work. Then I thought it may be the ram so I run some checks, nothing. The only error I could get on those checks was a total system lockup.

Then I visited for a quick look the toshiba forums - that I should have done earlier sadly - and the first suggestion the admins there gave to people that have overheating / random locks problem is "have you tampered with the default video drivers"?

ah.. I thought. It never crossed my mind that it could be that before the cpu overheating.

After cooling the pc down at a low cpu setting and max fan cooling, tried again the old default drivers. After a 2 or 3 hours of intense 3D gaming, no lockups.

However, I'm worried this 'adventure' may have had a lasting effect. I'm afraid something may have 'burnt' and have lasting effects

At least though it's an old laptop and I would change it in a few months but not now though.

temeteus82

Usually drivers won't cause overheating unless they are overcloking the card to get more performance out of it. But in general in laptops if you overclock them they just stop working ASAP no BSOD's ...
The symptom's you have described are pointing to overheating and to some windows errors caused by the shutdowns. IF you can clean the coolers on your laptop I recommend to do so. My cousin had similar issues some time ago and he found lot's of dust in the cooling systems. After he removed the dust the laptop was running fine.

Al_Vampyre

Generally speaking when a laptop manufacturer makes a gfx driver they are designed with gfx cooling in mind and have certain settings that allow the gfx card to run cooler (at the cost of performance). The standard drivers and therefore the Omega drivers are designed for desktop machines. That's why you can't download laptop gfx drivers from the card makers website, they always tell you to get them from the laptop manufacturer's website. Toshiba are notoriously bad for not updating gfx drivers for thier laptops, their argument seems to be that if the drivers work, you don't need to upgrade them, guess not many people game on Toshiba laptops!

Vikingod

The Omega drivers didn't fry your laptop. If I had to guess, I'd say running the SETI program maxing out your CPU for an entire evening is most likely what did it.

As Teme said, clean your heat sink with some compressed air, and keep doing that every once in a while, should fix your problems if it's not too late.

Zardon