Well, I'm kind of in a bad position right now. Windows 7 has a function called Timeout Detection and Recovery that seems to be happening all of the time on my machine. It's mostly an inconvenience at times, but it's practically a game breaker in CSS because every time it happens, the screen goes dark. I can still pub, but it makes 10 mans pretty much impossible since my money gets reset every time I have to rejoin. The obvious solution would be to stop what ever causes the TDRs from happening, but I'm becoming increasingly concerned that this might be due to hardware issues, and I'm not exactly floating in cash at the moment.

In other words, I want to know if there is a way to recover from a TDR in CSS without having to restart. I know that the game, for all intents and purposes, is still running because I can still hear everything, can type stuff in console (without seeing it), and can still use voice chat. Alt tabbing doesn't fix the issue. Reloading all materials doesn't help, nor does changing the DX value. I'm about to start messing with my registry, but I'd rather not if someone has a simpler solution.

I'm tempted to run the game in Open Gl, though I'd rather not as this would prevent me from playing on any servers set up for CEVO.

[Anubis]

TDRs are related specifically to the graphics hardware. As you've suspected of your own hardware, a TDR usually indicates a failing graphics adapter, but not always -- in my own experience I have had a corrupt Nvidia driver which occasionally caused the error. Of the options below, if the first two don't solve it, I'd say your graphics card is probably failing.

1) Update the graphics driver if you haven't done so already. Depending on your card's brand of chipset, you'll need to get the latest driver from either Nvidia (www.nvidia.com) or AMD/ATI (www.amd.com).

2) Try disabling Windows Aero. Aero can be disabled by changing your desktop theme to Windows 7 Basic.

3) You can attempt to disable the TDR check. I wouldn't advise this, as the check is there for a reason and modifying registry values can be dangerous. Though if necessary, this link may be of help: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/...87368.aspx. More specifically, the Registry keys section and the TdrLevel value would be what you're looking for. Note that I have never disabled TDR, and as such have no idea if this will work or what impact it may have if the card is indeed failing.

Well, I've already dicked around with my drivers enough that I don't think that they're the problem.

I think I found the article on microsoft.com earlier, but thanks.