video card driver crash....?

i ended up getting a laptop for me going into college this fall. was a present.

got a sony vaio fe855e. it works great and all. only thing to me that blows is the 1.6 dual processor, and i need to put more ram into it b/c its on vista.

either way, it runs everything infe, except for WoW.

i can play for abou 10 minutes, then i'll get a video card driver crash, and it'll flicker the screen, and in 5 seconds im back to playing. it does this a bit.

i first figured out my problem was that it wasnt in the natural state of my computers 1280x800 or w/e. so i changed it from 1024x800 to 1260x800 and it seemed to work fine. then after about 1/2 hour, i started getting the same things.

is it WoW, or my computer with crappy vista?

Does it ever happen when not playing games or during any other games? Did you try updating drivers?

So changing the resolution to the native resolution of the screen, the crashes went from every 5 minutes to every 30 minutes? That doesn't make any sense.

How hot is it when it crashes? It could be heat related.

Can you post a screenshot of the "crash"? What graphics card is in it? Do you have the most recent version of the drivers?

Most laptops are not designed for gaming.

it doesnt exacty crash. it says that the graphics card driver failed, and then that it has started responding again.....

hmm....thinking about the heat thing as well. dont want to shelf out 50 bucks for a stand and it doesnt help.

for the drivers, i updated all of them. there really isnt a way to get a screen shot of it, just a little pop up notice saying what i just told you. the video card is the only one that doesnt update. every single one after that does though.

playing dvds and other stuff doesnt really have a problem. im not a huge computer gamer, so i dont have any real computer games. just WoW and toca 3.

Don't know sorry man, as I said - monitor the temps, try pointing a fan at the heat outlet to disperse some of the hot air.

Check for video adapter firmware and driver updates from the manufacturer regularly.

If it's still under warranty, maybe take it back to the place of purchase and show some of their techs the problem and see if it can be fixed under warranty.

Nearly all laptops use an integrated video solution that uses some of your machine's RAM for graphics - how much RAM is in the computer? If < 1GB, I recommend adding a 1GB stick to lift overall system performance.

i figured it out earlier today.

it is also a common problem for new laptops running vista for WoW. so its wasnt my hardware :).

uninstalled all the drivers this morning, and downloaded an update for all of them. seemed that was the way to do it. replaced them with the drivers from this month. it seemed to do the trick, and no more crashes. i do however get flashes on my screen while logging into vista. other than that, its fine.

i thought i updated everything, but then i googled it, and found a good link on the WoW forums for the chipset drivers. seems you have to manually update the drivers, not just use auto update, otherwise it wont find them.

Did your laptop come with XP and you upgraded to Vista? You neglected to mention that before now.

You need to check most drivers manually, many manufacturers don't go through the Microsoft signing//compatability process (so you get them through Auto Update) because of the expense involved.

it came preloaded with vista :(. otherwise, id be happily using xp on it.