CrazyTB's blog

I have a notebook with Nvidia 9500M GS. This videocard has "crashed" a few times already. These "crashes" can be identified as the screen freezing for a few seconds, and a glitched screen after it unfreezes. This glitched screen can be described as lots of small squares (2x2 pixels) appearing randomly over the entire screen. It seems like the video texture buffer for drawing the screen got corrupted. Also, over time those squares tend to fill up the entire screen, but they are cleared after switching to another window or doing something that forces a full redraw of the window (in other words, after sending new fresh data to the video card).

It has happened on 2010-03-09 while I was playing Bob Came in Pieces in Windows. (nvidia-crash-2011-03-09.png)

Later it happened again on 2010-06-10, also inside Windows. (nvidia-crash-2011-06-10.png)

But last month, in 2011-11-14, it happened while I was inside Linux. I wasn't doing anything "heavy". Actually, at that exact moment I was switching around workspaces using Cube plugin from Compiz and I had very few open windows. (nvidia-crash-2011-11-14-001.png, nvidia-crash-2011-11-14-002.png, nvidia-crash-2011-11-14-003.png, nvidia-crash-2011-11-14-004.png)

The following message was sent to the system log right after the videocard crashed:

NVRM: Xid (0000:01:00): 13, 0003 00000000 00008297 00000f04 3f266666 00000040

The solution for these crashes? Rebooting. Actually, maybe it might be required to power off the computer and then turn it on after a few seconds.

I don't know why they happen, or how to avoid them, but at least they happen very rarely.