I have a recently bought DELL Inspiron 9300 with 512 MB of RAM and a Nvidia GeForce Go 6800. I recently went to Dell's site and noticed there were a few updated drivers (graphics and wireless network card) so I installed them as well as an update for Dell's MediaDirect.

Shortly after that I got the following BSOD while opening a video in Windows Media Player 10:

A few days later, I got another BSOD after opening the lid of the laptop (the computer was not in Standby mode when I did so).

Microsoft's crash analysis site just said a driver had an error which isn't very helpful. And Dell's support wasn't very useful.

I'm leaning towards the new Nvidia Geforce Go 6800 drivers (78.11), but I haven't seen any reports that they are causing blue screens.

Can anyone tell me what driver caused the crash? Thanks.

Attached Files

Minidump.zip (38.3 KB, 6 views)

Hello and welcome to Techspot.

Both your minidumps crash at nv4_mini.sys which is your videocard driver.

Update to the latest version of your videocard drivers.

If you are already using the latest drivers, then try using an older version.

Just remember to uninstall your current drivers first, before installing any other video drivers.

P.s from only two minidumps, I can`t guarantee that the info I have given you is 100% correct, although it may well be.

Regards Howard

How about doing a system rollback (assuming you have it enabled in windows XP)?

Thanks. BTW how do you analyze the dump files? Does it say what a 0x1000000A error is?

I had a feeling it was the graphics driver. More specifically I think it is somehow related to the Nview Desktop Manager that is part of the Nvidia Geforce drivers. This is a feature which allows the windows desktop to directly use features of the driver to allow things like zooming in on the desktop, transparency, combining multiple displays and the like.

Under the previous drivers enabling this feature sometimes caused Explorer.exe to hang (badly). Apparently in the new drivers it causes BSODs since both BSODs occurred shortly after I enabled this feature. Which is ironic since the new drivers list one of the features as "improved system stability".

What I don't understand is why I am specifically having problems with these drivers since they are provided by Dell and my machine is a Dell. As far as I know, no one else is having problems with these. I would have thought that Dell would test the Desktop Management feature on the laptops.

Could this be an issue with the card itself or maybe some other piece of software isn't compatible with the desktop management feature of the drivers? If it's the former Dell should replace the card. If it's the later Dell won't do anything.

Anyway thanks again.

Take a look at this quick tutorial HERE

You might want to consider turning off fastwrites in your bios(if they are on), as this is known to cause issues with some videocards.

I`m not really familiar with Dell computers. Do you have to get your videocard drivers from Dell?


Regards Howard

Well Dell says I need to get the video drivers from them, but there are drivers put together by 3rd parties which supposedly work. In reality both the Dell and 3rd party drivers are just tweaked version of Nvidia's official drivers, but unfortunately by default the official Nvidia drivers are designed not to install on laptops.

In the mean time I uninstalled the drivers and let the default drivers from Win XP SP2 load up and redownloaded and reinstalled the same latest drivers from Dell. I noticed one of the menus was different this time so maybe my download was corrupted. I used it for a few hours last night and tried some risky things with the Nview Desktop Management feature enabled (eg: closing the lid while playing a video, going into standby, etc) and didn't BSOD. I also told the N.D.M. not to attach to explorer.exe or rundll32.exe which I'm hoping will make it more stable. If I do BSOD I guess I can just leave the NDM feature off.

Thanks.