The error above has been going on for a couple months now; the screens will flicker, flicker, sometimes Firefox will crash completely, and I get the "graphics driver has stopped and recovered" error msg. I've tried a number of things to try and fix this, and I'm just at my wits' end, because nothing is working to keep this error from happening.
I tried uninstalling the driver; it then just loaded "Microsoft basic" driver, which meant I couldn't run 2 screens, the laptop's built-in plus my external monitor, so I had to roll back to make it use the Intel HD Family driver again.
I tried doing the registry edit, adding the "TdrDelay" with a value of 8, to the "Qword 64-bit" entry of Graphics Driver in HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE/System/Control. It made no difference, I still get the error.
I tried downloading a newer driver from Acer; even though I specified win 8.1 in the search for drivers, when I tried to install the driver, my system informed me that the driver was not for my version of Windows, so it would not install. What I have installed right now is 10.18.10.3496; I tried installing VGA_Intel_10.18.14.4062_W81x64_A -- which, as you can see, shows that it IS for 64-bit Win 8.1, but my system thought it was the wrong version, or something.
I've gone thru the "performance" settings in Advanced Settings of my machine, and turned off all the display bells and whistles except for smoothing screen fonts and showing thumbnails rather than icons -- all the other fancy settings are off.
I still get the error, though my system is showing over 50% available memory -- I got this machine fully loaded, 16GB, when I bought it, so it's got over 8GB free RAM, even when throwing this error.
In looking thru the "events" of the graphics driver, it seems to have been installed on 6/26/17 (though I got this machine in 2015), so that must have been a system update, and that's approximately when this error started happening. I've considered trying to roll the system back to pre-6/26, but I fear that it will continue to give me updates dated from 6/26 to the present, so it wouldn't be a permanent fix.
Can anyone help me figure out how to stop this annoying error?
Thx,
Andria