Where is the super seckrit "yes i want to fully remove every last visage of these drivers" option?

A few months ago Dell released its 8.17.12.5738 version of the NVIDIA drivers for my M17x R1. I held off on upgrading them because I was quite happy with the ones I had. After I received StarCraft II and started having some funky video issues with the game I installed the new drivers.

And since then my system has gone to hell. It will randomly freeze with a black screen. It will switch over to a red flickering screen. On occasion it will hang, flicker, beep, and give me a message saying Windows had recovered from a video error, before beeping, flickering and blue screening.

So I went back to the drivers that came on my recovery CD. And yet the problem continues. I've removed the drivers and NVIDIA software via add remove programs and via the device manager and yet the issues continue.

I'm hoping/guessing that its simply an issue of the drivers not getting fully removed and cleaned off the system. I remember there used to be a post here about how to completely remove a driver install, but I can't seem to find it. I think it was done by BatBoy or MOO!

Does anyone have a link or remember the process?

Thanks

(System specs Mx17 R1 Intel Quad 9000 (2.0GHz currently not OC'ed) dual 260M 4 GB RAM DDR3 1333 dual 320 GB HD in RAID 0)

 

Are you running any temperature monitors?

Some of the descriptions you are describing sound like temperature issues with the memory on the video card.

Try running HWinfo32 or GPU-Z and then go into a game and see what kind of temperatures you are getting.

If you for sure think it might be drivers run CC Cleaner or driver sweeper to remove your current drivers. Reboot... Run CC Cleaner again and perform the registry cleaner option then reboot again. Then reload the new drivers... I have a 260M (just single) and the 260.89 drivers from Nvidia are working well for me.

 

Thanks anderj235. I ran CC CLeaner over it several times yesterday before, and after removing all the NVIDIA software and drivers, installed the latest drivers and that seems to have done the trick.

I don't think its heat related, given that it would happen right after boot, other times it would play fine for hours (WOW and SC2) without issue. And then it would randomly crap out while sitting at the desktop or browsing the web.

 

Glad you got it working... installing new drivers can be pesky sometimes... so glad we have these wonderful things like CC Cleaner and driver sweeper to keep our systems running at optimal performance.