Why did I suddenly go all VGA?
February 8, 2011 12:36 PM   Subscribe

How did my laptop's display driver suddenly cease to exist?

Last week, I opened up my laptop, which had been asleep, and was in the middle of typing an email when suddenly the screen resolution changed itself, without warning, to 800x600. After some poking around, I determined that it had reset itself to Windows' default VGA driver, and I couldn't find any other drivers. After a little googling I was able to download the correct driver from the laptop manufacturer's website, and everything is fine again.

But... WTF? Is this going to happen again? Is there a virus that only eats video drivers? Should I be worried that my OS is corrupted somehow?

Relevant info: I am running Windows 7 on an ASUS UL30A laptop. I was running Firefox and iTunes at the time. I do not currently use any anti-virus software.
posted by thehandsomecamel to Computers & Internet (4 answers total)
 
No idea about that particular driver/laptop specifics, but being anectodtal I can tell you I've seen just what you experienced (and even weirder crap) when drivers crash and/or decide to give the operating system some form of trouble. On a few lucky cases the issues went away after updating the video driver to a new version, on others there was nothing to do but rebooting (yeah, I know) and in one case (in Vista, of all things) the driver was able to reboot itself soundly and fix the mess. Still being anecdotal, I think this tends to happen more often in laptops that have the "shared video memory" card settings, unless my experience is way unusual for the norm.
posted by Iosephus at 12:53 PM on February 8, 2011


Best answer: Yeah this usually happens when the driver running the card essentially crashes, provided it's not a hardware failure. My first step is to reboot, and then second step is to go hunt down an upgraded driver version. Drivers should be available here.
posted by msbutah at 1:01 PM on February 8, 2011


Also, you may have a reason for not running anti-virus software, but if you just don't want to bother with it may I suggest you install Microsoft Security Essentials. It's free, lightweight, and very unobtrusive.
posted by msbutah at 1:03 PM on February 8, 2011 [1 favorite]


And I'll come in, as I do following any other recommendation I see for MSSE, to point out that I've seen it do weird and irritating things to Windows computers, and that Panda Cloud Antivirus is also free (as in beer, for both personal and non-profit corporate use), lightweight, unobtrusive and competent.
posted by flabdablet at 3:36 PM on February 8, 2011


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