Display Driver Stopped Responding and Has Recovered

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...in Vista and Win7.

The source of this message is TDR (Timeout Detection and Recovery), a watchdog that triggers when a driver doesn't finish an operation in (by default) two seconds.

Windows will assume the (graphics card) driver is hanging, will reset the graphics subsystem, so that you don't have to restart the computer to recover.

When you see this:

Updating your video card drivers may well help -- because chances are its maker recently got a lot of bug reports and fixed it.

While two seconds is a lot (in terms of drivers), computers that are old, slow, and extremely busy may occasionally see false triggers.

You can change some registry values to set the timeout higher, or even disable TDR (I wouldn't recommend it - waiting longer is still handier than a hard computer reset).

See also:

• http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/hardware/gg487368.aspx