New User Requesting Help With Driver Updates

Hi. I recently purchased a M17x with the bigfoot killer wireless card and a Nvidea 560m card from the UK site.

I'm having a lot of difficulty working out what driver updates to install and the help on the Dell website is not very helpful (at least to me).

Entering my service tab on their driver update page came up with a whole series of drivers.

I downloaded the bigfoot one first (having read somewhere that this can cause problems if the latest driver not used). This seemed to work fine, internet working.

Then I had a look at the video section. This included both an executable and an iso file I wasn't quite sure what to do with. I hopped over to nvidea's site and they seem to have just released a new driver much more recent than dell's. I installed that which seemed to work fine display wise but found it had shut down the wireless card.

A bit perplexed at that I wound back the graphics card update, still no internet. Wound back the bigfoot update and internet back on.

So now I'm greatly confused about what to do (and dell getting started support doesn't seem to cover driver updates). Do I use the ones on the dell web-site (all of them and regardless of the fact they seem so out of date?) or in the case of the graphics card, the manufactuer's one? Did the internet problem arise because I did things in the wrong order (I can't work out for the life of me why installing a graphics card update would interfere with my wireless card)?

Any help or direction to a new user friendly resource would be much appreciated.

 

hi Df, congratz on the new laptop

Installing video card drivers should have no affect on internet

Have you tried installing the latest nvidia verde drivers first, then the latest bigfoot drivers?

 

Thanks I will give that a try. Thought I'd solicit some advice before mucking things up. Is there any reason I shouldn't use nvidia's version over dells (is there a reason they have a much older version aside from being slack)?

 

Dell are terrible at updating the videocard drivers. There is no reason to not use the newer verde drivers.

 

Newest and best from Nvidia: Graphics Driver - Verde 296.10 Driver - GeForce. No conflicts with the Killer 1103 driver(s) on my R3; however, the Killer Network Mgt. utility has caused problems in the past and is currently disabled.

 

I had real issues with random disconnects & reconnects until I loaded the latest driver from Dell for the Killer card. All has been rock solid since. I downloaded the new NVIDIA drivers last week the day after release, and Battlefield 3 now runs smooth on Ultra settings. I haven't had a freeze up since. The drivers do their job. I was so frustrated with BF3, I was about to ream out EA in a big way.