Random Black Screens with nVidia Graphics Card and Windows 7

For several months, I had dealt with an increasingly frustrating issue with my monitor’s screen suddenly going to sleep. Nothing I could do, aside from unplug it from the desktop and plug it back in, could get it to wake up. It certainly wasn’t a monitor issue (though I had those too), as swapping the monitor resulted in the same behavior. It wasn’t a cable issue, nor was it an issue with Windows power settings. I had narrowed it down to single point of failure – driver issues. My NVIDIA driver kept crashing and its frequency was increasing. It went from only happening in games to happening in Office and general browsing.

I had taken some steps to fix this – reverting to old drivers, installing new drivers from a completely clean slate. Nothing worked. Then I found this thread on the EVGA forums. The thread included details that matches my symptoms, down to the event log. According to that thread, it was an issue between the driver series and Windows 7. Even reverting to old drivers didn’t work as I simply hadn’t gone back long enough, as this issue has plagued the driver series for months.

So, I did what any sane person would do – I upgraded to Windows 10.

It has been two weeks now and not a single crash or blip in the event logs about a driver crash.

Now if you are having a similar issue, what do you do? Upgrading to Windows 10 for free ends December 31st, so after that you will need to pay a hefty sum for a license. I wish I can say I have a fix for users still on Windows 7 (aside from going back long enough on the driver history to avoid the bad drivers), but perhaps the thread above will.

Shadow Play not turning on

I tend to record games now and then, mostly for friends, using nVidia Shadow Play. It had been some time since I had used it, but when I went to turn it on the program in nVidia GeForce Experience, the program would freeze before crashing completely. A restart did not fix the issue nor did a driver update.

Thankfully, the next fix was pretty simple: Uninstall and reinstall GeForce Experience. That fixed my problem.

Others had reported different issues in the past. One possible fix, should the above not work, is to boot into safe mode (Restart and spam F8) and uninstall all nVidia software. Then reinstall it and it should work.

Still doesn’t work, or you have a fix that worked for you? Leave a comment below!