strange colored dots and ultimately "Display driver Intel Graphics Accelerator Drivers for Windows 8(R) stopped responding and has successfully recovered"

[BVerh2]

Hi,

I recently "discovered" the following issue on my laptop (Clevo; Windows 8.1; i7-4710; 16Gb RAM; Intel HD 4600 & Nvidia GTX860M):

As soon as I switch the Energy Profile to Maximum Performance (in Intel HD graphics control panel; Energy; Power Supply [might be a different word - mine is set to Dutch]), AND the power supply is indeed connected, all sort of strange dots appear when moving the mouse. When I use e.g. Firefox the display becomes "corrupted", the laptop totally freezes and finally the message "display driver Intel graphics...stopped responding" appears.

When I apply the Maximum Performance setting on Battery Power, this does NOT happen (when using the battery).

If I switch the profile back to "balanced" everything goes back to normal immediately.

On the images below:

1st image: black dots appear in the right click menu

2nd image: all those green dots aren't supposed to be there 🙂

Is this a known issue?

Thanks,

Bart

[Allan_J_Intel1]

Thanks for joining the Graphics community.

The "dots" are not normal at all.

What is the driver version you are currently running on the computer?

Does this problem happen with customized drivers from your computer manufacturer?

Have you tried connecting an external monitor? Do you see same "dots"?

Which version of Windows do you have? Windows 8.1 32- or 64-bit?

Does it happen only when using Firefox?

Allan.

[BVerh2]

Hi Allan,

I'm running Windows 8.1 64 bit, and the current Intel HD driver is 10.18.10.3960 (the latest - the generic driver not taken into account).

My initial thought was that it was caused by an "optional" windows update for the graphics driver.

I tried various things:

- driver rollback in device management

- uninstalling the driver

- reinstalling the manufacturer driver

- installing the most recent Intel generic driver

- disabling the driver/video card solved the problem (but then the laptop always ran on the "high performance card", meaning less battery life)

- I also tried to give the Nvidia card priority which worked well for both Firefox and Chrome, but NOT on the desktop. I read somewhere that dwm.exe always runs on the built-in card. It was indeed not possible to configure Nvidia to run dwm.exe using the Nvidia card.

- ultimately I did a full reinstall of windows and the (initial) drivers in an attempt to determine if it was a hardware issue (I didn't have the problem when I got the laptop)

After the reinstall everything worked normal again. Then I started going through some settings (the ones described in my first post) and all of a sudden the problem was back. I then realized that I had put the power profile to maximum performance, which I (obviously) also did a while ago, causing the strange behaviour. Probably when uninstalling the driver some settings of the Intel HD control panel are saved meaning that reinstallation of the drivers triggered it again.

The problem is not limited to Firefox, also Chrome crashed.

I will try to connect to an external monitor.

Bart

[Allan_J_Intel1]

Thanks for the information. Please let me know your findings.

Allan.

[BVerh2]

Just connected it via VGA cable and the "dots" are also visible on the external monitor.

[Allan_J_Intel1]

If this problem follows external monitor, the issue is related to the graphics controller. I would recommend contacting Clevo for warranty assistance:

http://www.clevo.com.tw/clevo_contact.asp?lang=en 藍天Clevo

Allan.

[BVerh2]

As proposed in a different post ( ) I tried the Intel Diagnostics Tool and both times (balanced & max performance) the test was successful...