So I installed Dishonored on my laptop from Steam, a game I've played for 4 hours in the past, load up the game and within a minute of being in the main menu the screen goes a bit weird before it freezes up and everything is locked so couldn't even control alt delete out of it. About 30 seconds later it comes up with a blue screen informing me there's been an error and collecting info with DPC_WATCHDOG_VIOLATION as the stop code.
Now every time the laptop would boot up within around 20 seconds of being on the home screen it would do the same so eventually managed to shift+restart and performed a reset/wipe of the windows drive. Reinstalled all updates and the driver for my Nvidia card which in device manager is saying it's working fine, but upon installing a game from Steam again it does the same thing and even when I set my power level to max power in Nvidia control panel it locks up again.
Now when I'd first had the problem I did install a new Nvidia driver and that had been the first time playing a game with the new driver but I have since then tried the driver I was using fine before that and it still locks up with the WATCHDOG error.