BCC116 & BCC117 "your video driver has stopped"

Summary

BCC 116 & 117 are called video time out and recover and are related to the video sub system.  Most often related to a driver but they can also be related to heat, overclocking, and occasionally under powered Power supply units.

The user will often see "your video has stopped and it recovered" but eventually it will not be able to recover.

Details
 

"It's not a true crash, in the sense that the Blue Screen was initiated only because the combination of video driver and video hardware was being unresponsive"

The first step would be to install the newest driver, (by completely removing the current driver, and installing the newest driver available),. and it it continues to malfunction, revert to a much older driver as some new drivers are somewhat buggy. If playing with video driver versions hasn't helped, make sure the box is not overheating.

In recent Operating systems the "Timeout Detection and Recovery" (TDR) components of the OS video subsystem have been capable of doing some truly impressive things to try to recover from issues which would have caused earlier OS's like XP to crash.

As a last resort, the TDR subsystem sends the video driver a "please restart yourself now!" command and waits a few seconds.
If there's no response, the OS concludes that the video driver/hardware combo has truly collapsed in a heap, and it fires off that stop 0x116 BSOD.

  If you have a desktop try removing a side panel and aiming a big mains fan straight at the motherboard and GPU.
 Run it like that for a few hours or days - long enough to ascertain whether cooler temperatures make a difference.

If it does, it might be as simple as dust buildup and subsequently inadequate cooling.

I would download cpu-z and gpu-z (both free) and keep an eye on the video temps

If it is not a driver and not heat it is time to start checking the hardware by running a GPU stress test

Try this free video stress test:  http://www.ozone3d.net/benchmarks/fur/
FurMark Setup:

- If you have more than one GPU, select Multi-GPU during setup
- In the Run mode box, select "Stability Test" and "Log GPU Temperature"
-Click "Go" to start the test
- Run the test until the GPU temperature maxes out - or until you start having problems (whichever comes first)
- Click "Quit" to exit