I recently placed a post in the Video Cards section, as I at first believed my problem to be related to my 4870, but now I know differently. I've looked for a delete button on my thread, and can't seem to find it. Apologies if this has caused a problem! I wasn't sure whether to amend the last one or start this one. I'll mark the other one as needing deletion.

I've been suffering random crashes, which manifest themselves as a frozen screen in-game or on Youtube and sometimes just cursor loss. Tabbing back to my desktop shows a black screen with various menus and opening and closing and my toolbar is placed on the top of my screen. I cannot do anything at this point, including trying to ctrl, alt + del so I have to press the refresh button.

Knowing the 4800 series to be buggy, I blamed it on my card, but today I suffered another crash but was fortunate enough to make out an error message: 'dwm.exe application error'. I've had a search and as far as I can see dwm is responsible for the Vista graphics. I've not been able to get any further than that as it seems to be a fairly rare problem, except I did come across a dodgy offer of a downloadable program that can fix my registry.

I'm confused at this point. This is a new PC and I know it's come with a restore disk, but I don't know whether that can just repair a faulty registry? I've tried contacting the makers of my PC and their online messaging system appears to be down. Is there a registry repair tool out there that's trustworthy and would it work?

To be honest, I'm scared I've been stuck with a rather expensive lemon and really not sure what to do. Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated!

Registry is a very critical area in editing, yes you can have System Restore points made, but it won't help if you can't run System Restore even from Safe Mode if required.

Before doing any of this type of editing, its best to back up all your important data to external media

Note: Running a full restore of your computer does not require manufacture support
Just select the Fn Key (?) or whichever key you need to press and run a full restore on your computer. Not hard to do. ie User friendly.

By doing a Full restore of Windows, you will at least confirm its not software related, and may stop another Topic on the same issue



You may also be able to contact your Manufacturer by email or chat or phone, more help here on that: http://www.techspot.com/vb/topic117607.html