Windows 7 crashes when watching flash in fullscreen

[cokesmoke]

Hello,

Do anyone else have this problem? and do someone know how to fix it?

This happends randomly every now and then, and freezes my whole system (Mouse and Keyboard don't react, and the screen goes to standby after about 10-20secs)

Computer Specs:

Asus P5N-D Mainboard

Geforce GTX 280

Intel Quad Core Q8200 2,33GHz

4GB RAM

MS Windows 7 Ultimate 6.1.7600/MS Windows 7 Ultimate RC (tested with both)

Screenies (taken with a camera since it totally freezes, so no posibility to take screenshot):

Any help would be greatly apreciated

[cluberti]

Honestly, given a hard hang with no keyboard/mouse input that would likely be some sort of hardware issue, although it's not entirely clear if it's the video card or the system RAM that would be at fault.

[cokesmoke]

I considered that... but it only happends in the two versions of 7 that I use... never happened in windows XP, windows vista or ubuntu (or any of the other x linux builds I've tried lately), so I kinda doubt that it's the problem...

[cluberti]

Well, XP doesn't tax the GPU (even when running full-screen video) as most of the compositing is done on the CPU. Vista does have GPU compositing, but Vista's design actually has a second copy of GPU memory in system RAM, and the compositing of full-screen video, unless the video card driver has hooks to accelerate the MPEG video, would still be done on the CPU. Now with Win7, however, the video *would* be running on the video card directly, even without an accelerated codec, because the screen, in it's entirety, is being drawn by DirectX without any "second copies" when DWM was enabled - this *would* stress the GPU under Windows 7, but not in Vista or XP, on the same exact hardware. I understand you don't see this as a potential cause of the problem, but it's likely because what you visibly see on your computer when playing the flash video full screen (even though visibly the same across 3 OSes) is not actually *happening* the same underneath. I would bet that if you disable aero and force the system to use the standard VGA driver you would see no more lockups (it'd go back to XP/Vista's on the CPU handling the display, rather than offloading to the GPU). If that's the case, you can be sure it's the video card.

[cokesmoke]

After faaaaaaar too many hours googling I came across a hint to disable Hardware acceleration on the flash... have watched about 10 clips after that without the crash... does this match your idea that it might be hardware-related?

[cluberti]

Indeed. You've moved the video from the GPU back onto the CPU, and viola, it's fixed. I'd call either nVidia or the store you bought the card from and get an RMA.