Some times my video card driver (Intel GMA X4500HD) crashes and gets restarted automatically. But more often (almost every time I watch a flash-powered online video for a period of time) it just gets slower and slower and extremely slow until I restart my computer. This looks like a resource leak in the video driver code and I'd like to try restarting it alone without restarting the whole system. How do I restart it (or cause it to crash immediately to be restarted automatically by the OS) manually?
4 Answers
Use the Devcon
tool from Microsoft.
Using DevCon, you can enable, disable, restart, update, remove, and query individual devices or groups of devices.
To list display devices use the following command:
devcon listclass display
To restart a device use the command:
devcon restart "class id"
Example:
devcon restart "PCI\VEN_115D&DEV_0003&SUBSYS_0181115D"
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2@DBX8 Isn't it up to me to rate the answer based on my own opinion? I don't think it's worth a 1GB+ download to restart a graphics driver if you can do it with a smaller utility. May 23, 2014 at 7:34
- Get the file:
devmanview.exe
from Nirsoft, move it to..\windows\system32\
and run it. - Get your device name by opening
devmanview.exe
: right mouse click and selectProperties
on your video device. - Copy "DEVICE NAME" to clipboard for use in the script: for example: "NVIDIA GeForce GTX 260" or "AMD Radeon HD 7900 Series" Open notepad and copy paste this code:
@echo off echo. echo *** Restarting GPU timeout /t 2 /nobreak >nul devmanview.exe /disable_enable "NVIDIA GeForce GTX 260" echo. echo *** DoNe timeout /t 2 /nobreak >nul taskkill /f /IM explorer.exe explorer.exe
Remember to change "NVIDIA GeForce GTX 260" to your Graphics card name taken from ..\windows\system32\devmanview.exe
Save the notepad file as a nameyoulike.bat
.
Double click to reboot your GPU and driver.
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3This is the only one that worked for me-- I couldn't figure out how to download devcon. I suggest you provide a link to devmanview.exe, and also list the step open "devmanview.exe" to get the device name.– MattParkDec 10, 2013 at 2:08
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Awesome, thanks! I had this in Windows 8.1 with World of Tanks and a NVIDIA GeForce GTX 880M and it's much nicer than restarting Windows. Jan 2, 2015 at 15:38
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Wow, it actually works, thanks! N.B.: It also kills of Firefox on my system.– DexterMar 29, 2015 at 21:10
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You can restart it using device manager
- go to start menu
- search for device manager
- find display adapters
- choose your card right click and choose disable
- the screen will be restarted and the size of the screen will be very small
- right click and enable it