Upon returning from TechEd, I went to power up my trusty old workstation (an aging Intel D865PERL-based machine), however it didn't start up at all. After double-checking that it was actually plugged in properly I suspected that the power supply may be the culprit.

I'd had a similar problem with the kid's PC a while back. I'd bought a new replacement SHAW PSU and it worked for a time, but had subsequently started freezing for no reason, so it had been put aside.

I took the new PSU out of that PC and dropped it into my workstation. Turning on the power got an immediate response – fans whirring and all the right sounds coming from the machine. Everything looked good until the after the "Starting Windows" screen disappeared. After a long pause I was greeted by nasty BSOD:

STOP 0x00000116 (0x876c5008, 0x90835640, 0x00000000, 0x00000002)

nvlddmkm.sys

I could boot the system in Safe mode, but as soon as I allowed it to reboot normally it would BSOD again. Windows 7 Action Center tries to be helpful and suggest I go to the NVidia website to download a new driver that fixes the problem. A nice idea except that the GeForce FX-based graphics card that this machine uses was last supported by driver version 96.85 from 17th October 2006 (which I was already using).

Researching this error I came across this thread. I tried the suggestion of adding the TdrLevel DWORD value to the registry but unfortunately the BSOD remained.

So the problem is somehow related to the graphics driver. Quite bizarre as I've never had problems like this before. The only thing that changed was the PSU. This made me suspect that maybe the new PSU was also problematic. That might well explain why the kid's PC also froze for no reason too.

So what to do? Buy another (better quality?) PSU in the hope that it will resolve the BSOD, or go the full hog and upgrade this circa 2003 system with something a little more modern.