Before I contact the manufacturer of my computer, I wanted to run this past all of you for some suggestions. My machine is from Xi and only runs SolidWorks and MS office 2007. Intel Core2Duo E8600 @ 3.33 Ghz ; 8gb ram ; nVidia Quadro FX 1700 with approved driver; Vista-64 Business, sp1. SW 2009-64 ; sp4.1.

I have a few things happening and they are starting to hsppen more frequently. In fact, I have a fairly complex mold design that I cannot complete on this machine, so moved it over to my notebook to complete and it is going well over there. First of all at the beginning of my sessions, I have been seeing a crash as soon as I try to open a file at the beginning of a session. This has been intermittent and non-repeatable and has been going on for at least a year. Lately, I have seen the computer just shut down-like somebody pulled the plug. This happened 4 times yesterday within about 45 minutes-that's when I decided to switch to my backup system. I had seen this maybe twice a month for the last 6 months, but the last week it has been ramping up-as the current project was getting more and more complex. I have also seen lockups occasionaly, when editing a feature-but this doesn't seem that out of the ordinary :-).

I checked the event log and I am seeing a lot of event ID 501 followed by event ID 500.

501 reads:

The Desktop Window Manager is experiencing heavy resource contention.

     Reason              :               Graphics subsystem resources are over-utilized.

     Diagnosis          :               A consistent degradation in frame rate for the Desktop Window Manager was observed over a period of time.

500 reads:

The Desktop Window manager is experiencing heavy resource contention.

Both of these messages reference video memory ; one is calling it degradation and the other referencing responsiveness.

Since I am my own IT manager here, I would appreciate some advice on how to proceed. It almost looks to me like I may have some bad memory on the graphics card or that the card is bad altogether. The machine is still under warranty for `parts & labor' but I would need to send it back to get it dealt with. On the other hand, if there is simply a setting that needs to be changed to get the vid card working right then that would be great. Thanks in advance for any help with this.