I love easily solvable problems. I call them instant hero issues – you can solve them in 5 minutes flat, and you instantly become a hero. I wish my problem that I was struggling with for the last two days was this easy to fix. A guy dropped off a desktop at my desk yesterday with a BSOD on boot. I looked at the message and it said (and I’m paraphrasing here) that nv4_disp caused an infinite loop.
I love infinite loops – they are awesome. Whenever I cause one, I sit back and say “behold mortals, for I have created infinity”. Of course I can usually kill my own infinite loops. Ones that occur during the windows boot process are not nearly as much fun. So I decided to track down nv4_disp which turned out to be an Nvidia display driver. Thanks Nvida!
Solution was trivial:
- Boot windows into Safe Mode with Networking
- Go to Nvidia website and nab brand new set of drivers for the GeForce FX 5200
- Install the drivers
- Reboot
- ???
- Profit (INSTANT HERO BONUS +30)
Apparently this problem is caused by the well known “NVidia Sucks Ass” issue with the GeForce drivers. Hopefully this won’t happen again – the drivers are up-to-date now, and the machine seems to be fully functional. But you never know. At least I should be able to easily fix it next time if this thing comes back.
I know, I know – a half witted monkey with a full frontal lobotomy could probably fix this. Sigh… I wish my users were as smart as monkeys with full frontal lobotomy. But you know what, sometimes it’s nice to solve an easy problem for a change. Cause, really these are the only types of problems that can give you this sort of instant gratification. Putting a check in the win column now and then, and actually helping someone gives us the energy to plug away on those hopless projects that have no real solutions – only workarounds an mega-hacks. It’s nice to have someone actually thank you for resolving a problem rather than trying to explain to them you not secretly the infrastructure and crashing the servers just to have something to do. ;P
[tags]nvidia, nv4_disp, infinite loop bsod, bsod, geforce fx 5200[/tags]
I see this problem on a monthly basis. It’s been an ongoing issue with nvidia’s drivers for sometime now. Usually updating the drivers fix it, but they have a tendency to fudge themselves and you have to re-install again.
Are the high end cards affected too? I guess this is a good reason to stay with ATI for now.
hehe, I get to fix a lot of “instant hero” problems. My dad quite often has some small thing get a little screwed up, which I can quickly fix and re-affirm my status as a techno-God
This happens a lot if I’ve had to reformat and reinstall Windows as a solution to a bigger problem, and forgotten to set everything back the way it was – stuff like keyboard layout not being properly localised, or certain little things in Firefox.
I’ve done these things enough times to be able to do them off the top of my head, some of them are practically in muscle memory (if you push me I could probably recite from memory the registry location that changes where XP looks for the “Documents and Settings” special folders).
My dad doesn’t really use a computer. He actually got a broken laptop from a relative. I replaced the display, added more memory and it’s like brand new – it’s a 2.6 GHz with 1GB of memory and it runs WinXP almost effortlessly.
But, he doesn’t know how to use it. He wants me to teach him, but he never has time to sit down and learn how to even turn it on or browse the web. :P
Sigh… Maybe one day I’ll finally get him online…
This was actually the machine I was using while my desktop was on the fritz – cause frankly, it’s faster than my work laptop. :P
@Luke’s first post: yea, it affects the high end cards as well. But I have seen this kind of error with ATI cards as well. It’s not as prevalent but it does happen.