A197VP crashes when playing games

[Lundmark]

I am playing Far Cry on my VAIO and I have experienced occasional crashes. I have installed the Radeon OMEGA drivers and it comes with a utility called VPU Recover that detects crashes from the graphics card.

Apparently, what happens is that my graphic card crashes when I play Far Cry, according to VPU Recover. The game freezes for about half a minute and then an error dialog box is displayed, saying that VPU Recover has reset my graphics card since it crashed.

This is odd since I haven't overclocked it or anything. I am thinking that I might have a defect piece of hardware here. What do you think?


I am however sorry to report that my particular problem does *not* seem to be caused by the OMEGA drivers, nor by Far Cry, but simply by heat. I've come to experienced problems with the original ATi drivers that comes preinstalled when playing games like Command & Conquer: Generals.

After about an hour, the graphics card intends to crash. At this point, the computer is quite hot and restarting the computer and directly relaunching the game makes the computer crash again. It seems it has to cool down before I can play again.

This to me is not OK. It shouldn't crash no matter how I use it - at least not due to hardware or heat. Buggy software is alright, but I hate hardware failures.

So my question is, is my computer defective or is heat a known issue? It has to be fixed somehow cause I really need this machine for playing games and editing video and I haven't paid this much for a luxury computer that bails out on such things as this.

[TygerTyger]

I'm fraudulently impersonating an engineer does that count? Well I'm glad it will be counted as a fault, although if it does it with all games it's a slightly different issue.

[kee-lo_]

LOL Tyger, at least we're doing our job.....

[Frankeng]

I have the same problem with my A197XP, but not only with games like far cry. The notebook crashes also when i play strategy games like Knights Of Honor or Civilization III. Yes, this isn't right, especially when you pay about 3000 Euro for the machine. I guess this is the last Vaio I ever bought. I had an other one before and it made even more problems. But i hoped, that Sony would produce better notebooks in the meantime.

[jammold]

Pity - seems as if VAIO's are not all that great for games - couldn't you try using it for something else?

[kee-lo_]

Agreed, specially when VAIO Stands for video audio integrated operation!

[jammold]

LOL - Even the logo with the sine wave and I O representing ones and zeros gives a little hint on analogue data such as audio...

Sony will not likely deviate from the audio/visual side to allowing them to flawlessly run games.

[kee-lo_]

Yeah but games are audiovisual, so they should work on that too...

[jammold]

True - other laptops may be better suited to this, or ideally use a desktop for games...

[kee-lo_]

Yeah, desktops are the best gaming units, as are shuttle cubes.

[davidplant]

i have the same problem there are 2 main games i run ROME total war and soldiers, it crashes on both of them, the crash isn't a lock up i just get white dots all over the screen and then it crashes saying ati driver error, i contacted vaio about this and they said to re-install all drivers and vaio updates, i did this and it still happened so i went back to vaio and they said it was a 3rd party problem not theres!!!