Oooook, for the past week, my lappy has seriously been acting up. It will get caught every 30 seconds or stay that way for a second or 2. i can tell when it does this because when I have my music going it will get stuck on a single note and sort of repeat over and over again really fast. And If it's not doing that then it's freezing completely, meaning the music will stop, my mouse won't move, etc. Sometimes this will last a few seconds, other times it lasts up to a minute or until I restart it. Then sometimes when i go to restart my lappy it has trouble restarting. First it will shut off and the screen and all the little lights on my keyboard will turn off, then the little lights will come back on but the screen stays blank. It will stay that way for about a minute then the little blue lights turn off again and then turn back on. I usually have to hold the power button down until they go off again, wait a few minutes, then try again. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesnt.

Anyways, That's the problem I've been having with the lappy. Now, the occasional freezing is tolerable for a while. I can still do normal stuff it just takes a while longer.
As for the affect it has on Toontown, i will be playing it and then all of a sudden my entire screen will go black like its shutting off, then come back up with my menu bar on the bottom, the window bar on the top, and the toon hand pointer, but the game screen is black. Then I get a little message that pops up from the bottom corner that says the Display Driver stopped responding and has recovered... but the screen is still black. So far it has done this to me in the middle of 3 buildings. I was just bearly lucky enough to be on the last floor of one and has a sf on the other who understood my problem, but on this last one i had to exit cuz i was causing problems for the toons i was in the building with.

It's really frustrating cuz I'm almost done with 3 of my tasks but i cant finish them because of my crazy computer! aaaahhhhhh!
Someone help please... If it's in your power or knoweledge of whats going on I beg of you, help meeee.

The first thing I would check is to make sure that you have the correct video driver installed.

Have you recently done a driver update for your display adapter (video card)? What type display adapter do you have (you will find this in your device manager under display adapter) and what is the driver date?


Overheating could also cause this problem. Do you use a laptop cooling mat and have you noticed if your laptop is running hotter than normal?

What operating system are you using? What model is your laptop and do you know how much ram it has?

I don't think the driver has changed recently, but what I have is NVIDIA GeForce Go 6150... there's no date by it so I don't know how old it is or anything. I don't even know how to check for an update.

With all the restarting its actually running cooler than usual. I dont have a cooling pad but it's not any hotter than it usually gets.

I'm using Vista and I have a HP Pavillion 17 in. laptop. I'm not sure how many rams it has though... if maybe i knew what a ram was? (forgive the ignorance)

RAM is also called memory. Vista will run ok on one gig of ram, but when you start playing games like WOW and Toontown, two gigs would be much better.

The crucial system scanner will tell you how much memory is installed and what can be added: http://www.crucial.com/

I did some reading on tech forums, and there were other people receiving the same error message. I didn't see any sure fire fixes....but I will keep on looking.


To see if you have the latest video driver: http://www.nvidia.com/Download/index.aspx?lang=en-us select option 2, graphic drivers.

Here is a good link to optimize Vista's performance: http://windowshelp.microsoft.com/Windows/en-US/help/83EC0FFE-EE04-4D53-8B87-25D1F05C954E1033.mspx I recommend you try "turn off visual effects"


When you are trying to solve a problem with your computer, do one thing at a time and see if ther is any improvement. (Also taking notes helps) Set a system restore point before you start, too. http://www.howtogeek.com/howto/windows-vista/create-a-restore-point-for-windows-vistas-system-restore/

wow ok.... i have 2097152 MB of memory on here.

It's not letting me update because it says I can only update from HP but I can't seem to find any...

I've done everything and i still have a problem. im thinkikng of just backing up all my stuff and re-installing Windows. Because with the way things are acting i could have a virus or spyware.

I'm probably going to call HP first cuz i feel like ive tried just about everything...

Thanks for the suggestions!

You have two gigs of ram which should be enough. The problem is that the graphic card your laptop has shares system memory, which means it doesn't have it's own dedicated memory. Here is a good explaination from the WOW forum:

The main problem with the 6150 is that it doesn't have any dedicated memory. All of it's memory is shared with the system. Because of this, memory access is very slow. Even if you add RAM to the laptop, there is still the bottle-neck of the graphics only being able to access RAM every second processor tick. Also, the 6150 has a low core speed and only 2 pixel pipelines. It is really not suitable for gaming at all.

This site compares performance of laptop graphics chip sets. The 6150 comes in the 5th performance group out of 6.

http://www.notebookcheck.net/Comparison-of-Grafic-Cards.130.0.html

Your graphic card is built into the motherboard so there is no upgrade for it. It ranks pretty low for gaming, in fact they say that it is only suitable for older games. (It is total BS to me----a brand new laptop running Vista should have a graphic card capable of running todays games and programs) Vista is a resource hog....the graphic card should have dedicated memory, not shared memory to run games properly. I would contact HP and see if they can offer some support for this issue. If you turn off all programs (including firewall and virus protection) and only have Toontown running, it may run a bit better. I have found many people complaining of this issue with Vista and the GO 6150. If you were able to install Windows XP instead of Vista, you would have much better performance.

Thanks for all the help. I really do need to call them. As of last night its gotten even worse. Now I'm not even playing Toontown and the message will pop up, every 10 minutes at most... I can hardly watch anything on my lappy anymore especially my movies. I'll figure out whats going on, then I'll post it on here so the rest of you with the same problem can get it fixed too. Thanks again for all your help. Now if they tell me to do all these steps I can simply say that they didnt work. ^_^