Crashing nVidia 950M on Brand new Aspire VN7 791G 52YN

Hi, I honestly believe I have tried everything to make this machine work. I now officically hate it and Acer!

It's brand new! So new, I returned it and demanded a new identical replacement from a different batch in the hope that my troubles with it were just hardware and not software.

But this second identical machine has the same identical issues when playing games on the nVidia 950M card.

On paper the spec of this machine is AMAZING value for money. 16gb RAM. Intel i5 4210H CPU. Intel graphics 4600 card AND importantly, the nVidia 950M graphics card.

It just won't stop crashing on a large range of games I've tried from Steam and also Minecraft.

I KNOW it's bottom of the range in terms of a games machine spec. But surely, it can play some games without crashing ALL the time?

My head is spinning from the 'solutions' I've tried.

Including.... running it on Windows 8.1 (as supplied) - Windows 10 (upgraded to).

Updating and rolling back over various drivers for the Intel 4600 and of course nVidia 950M. In particular with the nVidia (since that's the chip that crashes) I've tried at least half a dozen graphics drivers including from the Acer's own driver site (hopelessly out of date) to nVidia's archive going back at least 8 months, but mostly from this year, since older drivers would solve nothing.

I've ran Steam in admin mode. I've run it in Windows 8 comptability mode (and both together).

I've tinkered endlessly with nVidia's control panel - telling it to select nVidia and the primary graphics card. To auto select it. To use Intel graphics card (that works - but then nVidia doesn't run at all!). I've tinkered with the power settings (changing it to high performance). With Vertical Sync (turning it off).

SOME 'fixes' have worked - only to NOT work the minute I re-boot the PC! (this is a consistent issue). I've checked to see if any drivers were updated during the re-boot. Nope. I've turned off the windows auto driver up-date. Didn't help.

I have trawled pages and pages and pages of forums and community pages - and found many people who are complaining of similar issues but NONE of the solutions appear to work. So far.

I called Acer - they didn't want to help AT ALL with this model. They referred me to the retailer who apparently has the contract for 'support'. The retailer is offering my money back - they don't know how to fix the issue!

So, this is my last desperate attempt to get some help. I have the laptop over the weekend and if I can't find a fix by Monday, it's going back to the retailer and I hereby publicly declare I shall never, ever, ever buy an Acer again OR recommend it.

BUT, since I KNOW this is a software issue - I'd REALLY like to solve it and forgive Acer, if only that were possible!

Can anyone of you good folks here help me at all? I've have trawled this forum. Found some 'fixes' - tried ALL that I found. Nothing works.

Have had some games playing for up to 30 minutes on a very good day. But mostly they crash either instantly or within a few minutes.

Oh and one crash actually led to the first machine being nearly 'bricked'! I tried a factory restore (told you, I've tried everything!) and the factory restore failed! Took me TWO days to get that laptop working again. Only to have it crash some more and eventually, that was the first one I returned.

One final thing, I have tried stressing the graphics card on a couple of different benchmark testers. It's fine!!!! When it's not playing a game... it purrs like a contented pussycat! It just doesn't want to play games! Ugh.

And yes I know Steam is perhaps not the best platform. But I have a desktop and an older laptop on which it plays flawlessly. It's just THIS laptop that doesn't want to play nice.

Any ideas? Anything? Pretty please! (and no, smashing it with a hammer is tempting, but that would invalidate the warranty! Trust me, it HAS occurred to me!).

Accepted answers

All comments

philetus

It's Windows 10 drivers. Some of them need work.

lifemaestro

That could be the case but for the fact that the machine was out of the box with windows 8.1.

I tried for days to get it to work on 8.1. But the freezing and crashing was a consistent problem no matter what drivers I tried.

In the end I upgraded to Windows 10. No better and no worse. The issues are the same.

lifemaestro

Sighs... I figure no one so far can help. So let me ask a different question. Does anyone know what the most stable recent nVidia graphics driver for the 900M series might be? I've tried quite a few so far with no improvement in the core issue of freezing and crashing.

philetus

One of the problems is Windows 10 sometimes ignores your effort to update certain drivers and quickly reinstalls the one it likes.

If you haven't seen and tried this...

http://wccftech.com/fix-windows-10-nvidia-driver-conflicts/

lifemaestro

I surrender! I have I think exhausted every conceivable workaround. I did notice that when I rolled back the Intel graphics card to its most basic possible setup, no matter how I configured the nVidia card in nVidia control panel to be the only GPU of choice for a game, that the PC still tried (successfully and slowly) to run the game on the Intel GPU. No way was the nVidia 950M coming out to play.

Once I reinstalled Intel's full GPU drivers all was back to 'normal' - the nVidia card froze and crashed the PC as soon as I started the game.

The laptop is effectively junk. And I'm returning it, for a second time to the retailer for a refund.

I do not believe the laptop has a hardware issue - but there is clearly an unresolvable software issue rendering it useless.

Any last minute suggestions are of course, most welcome. I hate to give up, but this one has me beaten.

Cory-Acer

Hi lifemaestro,

This is certainly a strange issue and I know I might be late at this point, but the VN7-791G is not exactly new. I say that to illustrate that we have a pretty large user base for this model and if there were issues, it would be prevalent on more. My honest opinion is to start over and slow down. Clearly you are knowledgeable and you're doing a lot of things to correct this, but the fact that it's happening on multiple units may mean there are some similarities and something small that's causing a bigger problem.

As a quick side note, I had this terrible issue while playing H1Z1 where my PC would go 100+fps to 1fps for 3-5 seconds every once it a while and I could not figure it out. It wasn't load related or anything like that, it just happened. I'd reboot, it would be fine...the next day it'd happen again. I reinstall the game twice, updated drivers etc... and eventually I figured out that Firefox was causing it. I don't know why, I don't know how. I don't use Firefox as a primary, so it wasn't always open and that explained the erratic behavior I noticed. And I'm not blaming your issue on Firefox, I'm just using this as an example.

My starting suggestion would be to do a reload of Windows, take it back to how the product ships. You shouldn't have to update drivers, we're not trying to min-max performance at this point. Install one game, I'd suggest staying away from Minecraft for this test, see if you're still having crashes and then start installing other stuff one application at a time and testing. My guess is that some combination of software you have is creating all this havoc...unfortunately, it's not easy figuring out what.

lifemaestro

Hi Acer Cory, thanks for your reply. As you say, too late. I am now the proud owner of a different branded machine that worked right out of the box. Very similar spec.

That said, I take your point about the age of the model. In my quest for a solution I have come across many examples of people with the same issue. But never the solution.

I tried what you suggested when I had the machine(s). Both in window 8.1 and 10. I was very single minded. Boot the machine up, let windows finish doing it's thing, install the game and test.

Freeze and crash every time. That's when I tried countless workarounds for WEEKS.

I didn't give up easily. Still convinced that there was a solution somewhere. But I never found it.

The retailer now has two laptops which I presume they will return to Acer for burial (I returned them in working order, factory reset - but the issue would be still be there for the next owner if they re-sold).