Saturday, March 4, 2023

Lenovo / Windows takes a dump

Three swift bluescreens this morning on wifi and battery-power; C:\WINDOWS\MEMORY.DMP is where the "dump" got dumped. At well over a gigabyte. After these three, a shutdown and restart seemed to get it better again... until now. nvlddmkm.sys Thread Exception Not Handled. This is usually blamed on NVIDIA. NVIDIA got updated 28 February "531.18" although dxdiag says 23 Feb.

This started with the 2 March round of updates featuring KB5022913 for 22H2. But "only" one crash happened yesterday.

CONTROL PANEL 11:35 AM: After reinstalling NVIDIA, after like ten minutes nvlddmkm threadaborted again. So, I've set CPU for preferred physics and Integrated Graphics for general stuff. Which means nogaymz; excepting dosbox stuff and int-fiction, until NVIDIA get their crap together sufficiently.

BACKSTOP 3/8: I believe I got a clue. A temporary clue...

My Plan A was to scannow, and yes the windows \Logs\CBS\CBS.log did show I'd fixed some corrupted files. That didn't help however.

I pondered underclocking the CPU and/or NVIDIA; but I decided not to do this. Not least b/c I know not how. But meanwhile I had a feeling that this very browser - Brave - was associated with the NVIDIA crashes.

Brave was updated 2/23 over here. Also there was that bandwidth improvement. But I got the same problem in a coffee-hut. So I doubt either that particular update, nor the recent bandwidth firehose, caused this problem.

So I went to the NVIDIA display-panel to check up (via "Desktop" menu) on GPU Activity. Indeed Brave was running on the GPU. But whhyyyy?! - I never run games in the browser (and if I did they'd probably be tiny javascript or even int-fiction games). I suppose streaming can happen; but podcasts and even video don't really need the level of hardcore maths we get in a game.

Anyway having better Internet suggests I can, now, skimp on performance in the browser. In the win11 System app: Display > Graphics allowed me to add Brave to "power saving".

Long-term I have few illusions that my nvlddmkm problem is solved. Actual games will, I fear, not work well on this machine in future. DOSBOX, Ur-Quan Masters, other retro crap like that are already powersaved but what if I want some Halo in future?

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