Force display driver to crash and recover on Windows Vista

Windows Vista's display driver system allows drivers to crash and recover without blue-screening. Is there any way to manually force this process? I'd like to restart my display driver without rebooting.

The reason for my question is my machine's tendency to refuse to use native display resolutions after some amount of uptime and sleep cycles. When this happens, the resolution on my monitors is reduced to 800x600, and resets itself every time I try to raise the resolution back to the native settings. The only workaround I've found so far is rebooting (no updated display drivers are available for my integrated Intel graphics card).

kpozin

Posted 2011-06-23T04:24:04.737

Reputation: 1 518

1So it sounds like what you really want is to just reinitialize the display driver? Or are you specifically looking for a crash? – Flimzy – 2011-06-23T04:30:16.040

Anything that will work, really. There was a related question (http://superuser.com/questions/115232/how-to-reset-video-display-drivers-in-vista-without-restarting-os) for which the accepted answer did not seem to be adequate, so I was wondering if there was another approach one could take.

– kpozin – 2011-06-23T04:40:30.633

The first paragraph made me laugh because this is the first time I've ever heard of someone wanting Windows to crash more. – Randolf Richardson – 2011-06-23T04:59:00.787

Answers

Go to the device manager. Disable your graphics card and then re-enable it. This will force the device driver to restart.

surfasb

Posted 2011-06-23T04:24:04.737

Reputation: 21 453

Alas, this is Windows Vista, so when I disable the driver in the Device Manager, nine times out of 10 it fails to load when I try to reenable it, and I'm forced to use the generic fallback driver until I reboot. – kpozin – 2011-08-13T05:03:00.283

Strange, but ok. – surfasb – 2011-08-13T20:30:08.267

To restart the driver: Ctrl+Shift+Win+B

To simulate a detected hang and cause Windows to recover the device, force a TDR (Timeout Detection and Recovery) using this tool which comes with the "Graphics Tools" optional Windows feature (details here https://stackoverflow.com/a/35617090/1373514):

DXCap.exe -forcetdr

This is the mechanism behind the "Windows Vista's display driver system allows drivers to crash and recover without blue-screening." you refer to, but for your actual need the keyboard shortcut is more convenient and appropriate.

rwm

Posted 2011-06-23T04:24:04.737

Reputation: 11

Thankfully, I no longer own the Vista machine that required this workaround. Alas, I also no longer have a way to test this. – kpozin – 2019-07-11T00:30:12.400