I'm having a persistent issue with my Acer Nitro 5 AN515-43 where I'm frequently running into blue screens of death (BSOD) with the error message VIDEO DXGKRNL FATAL ERROR. After a BSOD, my laptop sometimes gets stuck on a black screen with the backlight still on, forcing me to perform a hard shutdown. It's frustrating because the BSOD can happen right as I boot into Windows. I've tried a lot of solutions, including reinstalling both NVIDIA and AMD drivers using DDU in safe mode, booting with one RAM stick, running 'sfc scannow', replacing the thermal paste, and even reinstalling Windows, but the problems keep returning. It feels like my drivers might be getting corrupted again. Any ideas on what else I could try?
3 Answers
Make sure to collect dump files for analysis. Check the C:WindowsMinidump folder for any crash logs. If you're able to grab them, you could zip the folder up and share it through a file sharing site; it would help folks like us diagnose better! Check out guides on creating mini dumps if you're unsure how to set it up.
I've had a similar issue with my Nitro 5 when I updated to the latest game-ready driver. It started crashing after that too. You might want to try rolling back to an older driver version and see if that resolves the issue.
It sounds like your issues are more related to driver conflicts or corruption rather than hardware failure since your laptop handles demanding tasks well. Have you tried updating your BIOS or using the combined driver package from Acer for both AMD and NVIDIA? Also, consider stopping Windows Update from automatically replacing your drivers. It's a good idea to check your disk and RAM for issues, too, as problems at that level can lead to driver corruption.
Thanks for the tips! I've done a disk health check recently and everything seemed okay. I've paused Windows updates but I'm worried it might still revert my drivers. Any thoughts on completely disabling updates?
I've heard that you can disable Windows updates using group policy editor or by changing settings in the services. It could help keep your drivers intact!
I've tried various NVIDIA drivers, but the crashes persist regardless. It's super annoying!