Viz Vista by Ed Tittel

In the past couple of months, I 've been grappling with graphics stability issues. Mostly, this has meant driver restarts where you get a message that reads something like "Display driver stopped responding and has recovered." Occasionally, this has involved a BSOD that mentions the Nvidia driver files nvlddmkm.dll or nvlddmkm.sys. When it happens, it seldom occurs more than twice a week. I keep checking the Nvidia driver download page, grabbing new drivers as they become available (including occasional betas), and hoping for the best.

Now that my production system has been stable for nearly two weeks, I'm finally getting around to dealing with other aspects of its behavior that aren't quite right. This morning, I resolved to address two issues that have been vexing me lately: an occasional but frequent case of "cursor freeze" from my mouse, and regular but brief stuttering or freeze in audio playback through Windows Media Player 11 or Windows Media Center. Let's tackle these in their order of occurrence here.

In reading over Chris Pirillo's daily newsletter this morning, I tripped over an interesting item entitled "Is Maximum PC right about Vista?" For those not already in the know, Maximum PC is a serious PC enthusiast publication, built around a glossy, high-concept monthly magazine and a Web site to match, with coverage of all kinds of high-end PC hardware, systems, peripherals, toys, tools, and more. I almost got lucky about four years ago when one of my publishers decided to go after some of this company's related book business, but alas the project never came to fruition. I provide all this by way of explaining why this little blurb grabbed my eye and my undivided attention.

The second Tuesday of every month is also known as "Patch Tuesday," because that's the day when Microsoft normally releases its security updates, along with other patches and fixes for its various Windows operating systems, applications, and so forth. Yesterday was the second Tuesday in September, and Windows Update proffered 10 items, most of which are described in the Security Bulletin for that month.Here, I'm going to focus in on one non-security update entitled "Update for Windows Vista (KB955302)".

OK, so I'm finally starting to relax a little bit. After six weeks of intermittent crashes and daily blue-screens, I've now gone four days on my production Vista machine without a major hiccup. I've still had a few minor problems, as I'll soon report, but it now seems somewhat safe to say that the system is reasonably stable and appears inclined to stay that way. I have one word to comment on this state of affairs: "Hooray!"