After 10 - 20 minutes of playing Warcraft 3: Frozen Throne the graphic card shuts down and produces the following message: ‘VPU Recover was unable to fully recover from a hardware deadlock and has switched to software rendering. To restore hardware rendering, you must restart your computer’. After this message, the computer is very slow. Reinstalling the graphics card driver and installing the latest driver does not fix the problem. The computer is a Pentium 4 3.0 GHz with 512 MB RAM and a Powercolor Radeon 9600XT 128 MB (DDR) graphics card. The operating system is Windows XP Professional.

There is a quick way around this problem, which is to disable VPU recovery. I don’t know exactly where the setting is for your video card, but you should be able to find that through the Display Settings. Go to the ‘Start’ menu > ‘Control Panel’ and open the ‘Display’ control panel. Click the ‘Settings’ tab and the ‘Advanced’ button. Have a look through the various settings to see whether you can disable VPU recovery. Also, try disabling fast write (if this option is present). Be aware that by disabling VPU recovery the computer may now just restart instead of gracefully returning the error message.

If the problem ceases after disabling VPU recovery, then this feature just may not be agreeing with your video card. However, should problems persist (such as the computer freezing) then the underlying problem remains. VPU problems have been traced to power supplies which do not have enough wattage. This really depends on how many devices you have installed in the computer. You can get a good indication of how much power your computer consumes by using the calculator at www.jscustompcs.com/power_supply/. However, your computer seems quite new so if the system was built by someone who knows what they are doing, then it should meet the power supply requirements for the given components.

There are several other factors which could be causing the problem. These range from a bad video card or AGP slot on your motherboard, to the computer case becoming too hot. It is quite difficult to track down the exact cause of this problem. If you continue to have issues after disabling VPU recovery and investigating the power supply angle, please contact me again.