Around about this time last night I had just finished modeling ,of all things, a simple mail box when i hit ‘Z’ > ‘Materiel Preview’ and bang! everything froze (whole system) right as Eevee kicked into life with this weird black checkered square pattern overlay-ed on my frozen screen followed immediately by a big ugly “Blue Screen of Death”. My laptop (Win 10) tried to restart automatically but hit another BSOD.
To make a long story short, everything is back up and running again but not quite at 100%. When I start my machine the manufacture’s logo (Asus) appears on screen as expected but it’s then followed by, and I counted, an 18 minute black screen before before the windows login screen decides to make an appearance. Now to Blender, If I fire up Eevee or Cycles with anything more complex than the default cube, blender immediately terminates.
Something’s obviously not right and I’ve only used Chrome, Spotify and Blender in 24 hours since the crash so god only knows what nasty little surprises I’m gonna find when I fire up any other Creative software. I’d imagine my GPU crashed, hence the weird checkered black squares, and the crash has now corrupted something deep in the bowels of windows, I’m not an expert in this area, I’m only guessing and could be very wrong.
The first thing I tried was re-installing my Nvidia drivers to no avail. I had a simular-ish problem in the past where things weren’t quite working right after I’d been messing around in the bowels of Windows and what fixed it was windows next update, so I had the bright idea to uninstall the last two windows updates and re-install them, again,to no avail.
It won’t let me restore windows from a previous point and as for “resetting windows”, I’ll cry if I have to reinstall the list of programs it’s showing me it’s going to uninstall to do that.
Is there anything I can do to maybe reset things without loosing everything?
It is mostly likely GPU related, if everything works fine then it is probably the drivers.
I know that if i made a complex scene right now and turned on render preview for cycles, my pc would simply restart. No Bsod or anything, i’ve had the same issue in two games, one in The Long Dark at startup where it is 50/50 and the rest of the game there are no issues and the other game is Detroit Become Human at some loading screens.
Windows event viewer says that it is kernal power failure whatever that means, i know my power supply is more than large enough and i have never had this issue in any other games or software.
I would also guess it’s GPU related.
Does your CPU have integrated graphics processing? Maybe it isn’t even using the GPU at the moment.
Check the GPU is working and check it is being used by Windows, then go from there. Check temps, check vram usage, run a check on the hard drive, do a memtest. I hope not, but you may have a bigger problem than just resetting Windows.
A friends windows 10 laptop was painfully slow. Task manager showed 100 percent disk use (plenty of hd space) it was windows updater constantly trying to write to disk. I did the manual windows update and everything back to normal.
Ok, so it’s been a few days of constant bluescreens, restart repair loops, safe mode and general poking and prodding(virtually) and I think my GPU is toast. For now My laptop is up and running again without crashing as I deactivated my GPU from the device manager thereby confirming the GPU as the culprit. I should also point out that my laptop is as old as the hills with an 870m with integrated HD 4000 Graphics, I’m so cheap it beggars belief.
So there’s still two thing I could do with some help with:
For the GPU, I’ve tried uninstalling and reinstalling the latest Driver, I get no errors but when the installer is done and I click “Finish”, Geforce Experience immediately prompts me to install the the latest driver, the one I just Installed. It appears as if I have no Nvidia driver despite having just reinstalled it. In the properties panel of my GPU in Device Manager I get a ‘Code 43’ error and after some google-ing I came across this youtube video, This seems to be a very simular issue to mine, restart repair loops and driver won’t install. 5.00 onward, updating the ROM, is the only thing I haven’t tried, as the vid isn’t exactly a tutorial and I feel a little out of my depth from this point on so any guidence on this would be greatly appreciated as it’s my last hope of getting the thing running again!
As for Blender, Im able to render Cycles on my CPU but Eevee crashes instantly and I’m not sure why, although not Ideal I still have Integrated Graphics, maybe it’s still trying to use my deactivated 870m?
I’m long overdue a massive upgrade either way but I don’t like having to spend Thousands of dollars in a panic. If I could get blender to limp along on my integrated graphics for now It would give me some time to think and not cause me to blow my bank account on the first thing I can get my hands on.
It could be cooling related as the gpu’s thermal paste being dry/cracked or the cooling fan is dusty but unless you want to open it up getting it serviced may not be worth the money as its clearly an old laptop
For Eevee the integrated graphics dont really work. you can use cycles to render but not eevee. As for the upgrade you can probably get a new desktop with everything BUT a new gpu for decent money but laptops with decent gpus are still around for fair prices (in my country Canada) as you its harder to scalp or mine with a laptop.