Hey.

This has been some weird problem that came up first in FFXI. It started when I updated Adobe Reader one day. I logged in and my video kept crashing. I'd try to zone and the video would flicker, and eventually would completely crash, showing vertical gray lines, alternating between light and dark bars. I uninstalled Reader and updated my video driver. The rest of the night I'd catch the occasional flicker, but it went away the next day. All was well.

So I've been toying around on the FFXIV beta on a friends account. I was running in to some issue where my computer would completely freeze, the video was crashing. One one crash, it actually BSODed on me, something about atikmpag.sys. A google search suggested that I should wipe the driver off of my PC. I decided to try updating to Catalyst 10.7 first, but the problem persisted. So I wiped it clean.

Now, I still can't do much. The last time I logged in, I played for about 5ish minutes, the whole while my video was flickering about once a minute. On the last one, it completely blew up, and did the old vertical gray bars again. Something I haven't seen in a long time. The only way to restart is to simply hold my power button down and hard restart, each time.

This last time, however, my computer refused to even start up. The lights would come on for a second and shut off. It even stopped doing that. I ultimately had to take my battery out, unplug it completely, try to turn it on again, and then plug everything back in.

So my real question is: any thoughts on what is causing this? What should I check out? This doesn't seem to be a heat issue, as my laptop gets hotter running FFXI than it does XIV.

I am using an Asus G73JH, i7 720Q, ATI HD5870M, Win7 64.

Edit: I should note that as it stands, the ONLY thing that has caused these crashes has been FFXIV. I can play any other DX9 games without any issues at all.