[britechguy]

Well, we have progress of a sort.   This morning the screen went black and I was expecting the Win8 equivalent of the BSOD message, but things came back, sort of.

 

Firefox stopped responding after the failure and never quite recovered until I intentionally shut it down.  It was OK after I brought it up again.

 

The message in the system event log is a 4101 from display with the text:  Display driver amdkmdap stopped responding and has successfully recovered.

 

Two of these occurred in very rapid succession, the first at 10:53:02 and the next at 10:53:06. 

 

I have not rebooted the system since then, it's now 1:25 PM, and there have been no additional incidents.  I suspect, though, that "this isn't over."

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This means that the graphic card drivers for the AMD drivers failed and the service was restarted. Let me know if it happens again, if it does, I'll make you do a clean uninstall of the current drivers and reinstall the latest one. This way, we can eliminate the possibility of corrupted/damaged drivers during the upgrade you did yesterday.

[Aura]

This means that the graphic card drivers for the AMD drivers failed and the service was restarted. Let me know if it happens again, if it does, I'll make you do a clean uninstall of the current drivers and reinstall the latest one. This way, we can eliminate the possibility of corrupted/damaged drivers during the upgrade you did yesterday.

[britechguy]

OK, thanks.

 

Also, it appears that there have been a number of other updates, some directly related to display and some not, from Toshiba for the C55Dt-A5305 laptop.

 

There have been a number of BIOS updates, among others.  What I find quite peculiar is that if you click on the link for the Toshiba Display Utility it takes you to a page for version 1.1.12.0, published 2013-12-19, but if you look at the list of all updates to that utility in the list contained on that page the actual most recent is 1.2.74.0_64, published 2014-09-10.

 

If you wouldn't mind taking a look at the page I linked to above to see if you think there is any "more basic" (e.g., BIOS) update that should be applied as part of this please do?

 

I try to avoid "throwing fixes at a problem" as much as I can, because you can't isolate variables very well.  But I also know that sometimes certain updates really do need to go in before others do.  I'm actually surprised that the Toshiba Service Station package, which is running on this machine, has not "mentioned" any of these.  When I open up Service Station right now, this is what is presented (and, no, I haven't applied this)

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Edited by britechguy, 20 January 2015 - 12:51 PM.

[Aura]

From what I see, the only issue right now is the AMD graphic card drivers crashing and/or causing BSOD, so we cannot fix that issue the normal way, we'll look into other solutions which might involve under component (drivers) update. For now, you can leave these drivers as they are. If it keeps on crashing, install the ones provided by the Toshiba installer application, since these drivers are modified to work on your laptop, under Windows 8.1 specifically.

[britechguy]

Aura,

 

         An update, and one partially the result of my own inattention.  All that follows is *after* this morning's two driver failures in rapid succession, so it shouldn't factor in to that.

 

         Windows Update announced that it had updates to apply, and I did, not realizing that one of these was for the Display Driver.   It reverted it back to the same one that had been on the computer before with the same April 2014 release date.  I guess the good news is that within minutes I got a genuine Win8 BSOD equivalent stating that atikdmag.sys (which I believe is that driver) had caused a system exception.

 

          As a result, the system has rebooted.  Of course we already know that this driver from Microsoft is causing problems, so I can't keep it.  What I elected to do is to install the Toshiba Service Station suggested driver via that app and see what happens.  You can see the exact version number and release date in the snapshot previously posted.

 

          If you want me to do a major rollback I can also do that.

[Aura]

Since you are using a driver that is probably older than the one suggested by Toshiba, I suggest you to install the one from the Toshiba application and see how it goes. Also, I guess you have "Recommended Windows Updates" enabled, this is what happens when you download and install them. Personally, I don't use them since they aren't critical to the OS and can cause a lot of driver issues, like we're seeing now. I disable them and set Windows to only download and install critial updates (Important Updates).

[britechguy]

Actually, I have Windows Update set up to download recommended and critical updates and let me choose which to install and when to install them.   This was my own dumb fault because it was a recommended update, but it just didn't occur to me that Windows Update would ever consider a driver with a more recent date and digitally signed by the device manufacturer to be something that they should replace with an earlier version of their own.   It was one of those really stupid, "Oh, maybe there's been an update to address this that came to pass just in the last several days," ideas that I should have thought the better of.   I actually do know better, and only seldom install specific recommended updates and hide the others I don't want to be bothered with again.

 

The Toshiba Service Station App has finished installing, and I'm doing a shutdown on the machine to get a clean start again, since things did not seem perfectly happy (which isn't surprising given the day the machine has had).  The version of the driver it installed is later in date than what it shows and is signed by AMD, not Toshiba itself, but it's not either one we've been dealing with before.  I'll post the snapshot in a few minutes because this post is coming from my own laptop.

[Aura]

The drivers are most likel signed by AMD, but the installer might be tweaked by Toshiba in some way. And yes, comparing the details of the current installed drivers, to the old ones will tell us the status of the current drivers.

[britechguy]

I'll be posting again in a few minutes.  We now have a new problem in that with this driver boot up has become glacially slow.  There's a long wait between the BIOS screen and the lock screen.  Once you enter the password you quickly get to the metro screen, but hitting desktop doesn't react for a while and getting the initial screen paint of all the desktop icons takes what seems like forever.  It's just finished "over there" so I can at least post the snapshot of the driver window shortly.

[britechguy]

Here's what the driver screen shows.  Behavior once the system actually comes up seems to be quite normal.

 

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[Aura]

Alright. It happened after the first restart from the drivers install? If so, restart it another time, just in case it needed one boot to adjust itself. If it keeps on doing that, we'll totally uninstall the AMD graphic card drivers, and reinstall the newest ones that I made you install at the beginning. These are the drivers that were causing you the BSODs issues, check back on page 1. Same information.

Edited by Aura, 20 January 2015 - 02:50 PM.

[britechguy]

I have restarted it several times, and boot time has improved but is noticeably slower than it had been in the past.

 

I'll try a few more times when the partner is away from the computer so as not to incur "the wrath of interruption!"

[britechguy]

OK, I've just done two restarts in a row and everything appears to be back to normal.  Heaven only knows why, because the three or four previous shutdown-restart cycles right after the driver was installed were anything but smooth and rapid.

 

Will post any updates necessary if I have misbehavior during the evening through to tomorrow morning.

 

One thing that's very frustrating for me about this particular laptop is that it has no disc activity light.  On all the other laptops we have or had there was always a small indicator light for disc activity.  I always watch this during boot because it gives me a good idea whether the computer is "still thinking" or is up and ready to go.  I'll never buy another machine (I have a desktop that lacks this same indicator light) that is without one again.

Edited by britechguy, 20 January 2015 - 04:44 PM.

[Aura]

Alright well let me know how it goes. Are you still on the Toshiba drivers at the moment, or did you install the latest one I linked earlier?

[britechguy]

Aura,

 

          The driver on the machine at the moment is the one from Toshiba, and the information regarding it is the most recent screen shot posted.

 

          Because this has been complicated by me, the sequence of drivers has been:

 

                           1.  April 2014 from Microsoft.

 

                           2.  Most recent from AMD

 

                           3.  Back to the same as #1

 

                           4.  Toshiba version