Major problem with GPU's & drivers

Hi all,

First up please excuse a possible duplicated post but the search function is not working for me at all - give me an invalid search function whatever I try (seems not to be my day at the moment).

I am having major issues with both of the graphics cards in my M11x (R1).

To give a quick description I turned my M11x off last night without any issues at all (no problems reported and Just Cause 2 ran very well indeed). Today I have turned it on to find Win 7 running without Aero and no graphics cards (integrated or discrete) detected at all. Looking at device manager I see both the Intel card and the Nvidia card are detected but are showing problems (no other information is available).

Trying to uninstall the Nvidia drivers (197.72) in control panel caused win7 to stop responding (recoverable from a ctrl-alt-delete), whilst trying to uninstall the Nvidia card from the device manager caused the uninstaller to instantly crash.

I have managed to get the Nvidia card working by installing the 260.99 drivers and switching to 'discrete' in the bios but this isn't exactly perfect as I have lost the ability to switch to the intel card to extend my battery life.

I am completely stumped what has happened here as nothing happened between last night and today to prevent the laptop from working properly.

Has anyone else encountered this issue? I really don't want to have to reinstall windows for this sort of problem (as it may end up occurring even after a complete reinstall) but I will if I need to.

Thanks all.

EDIT: Ok, I have got the switchable graphics back by doing a system restore but I am still not convinced everything is ok. Windows 7 reports no Anti virus software yet I have Avast running (this hasn't occurred before).

The system just feels 'twitchy'.

 

It might be best to do a fresh install of Windows.

 

yep, u'd better do a format and fresh install of the windows, and you can try to get the 260.99 switchable working

 

Thanks guys,

System restore seems to have 'fixed' my GPU issues however I am still concerned why it happened in the first place.

I will do a complete resinstall tommorow I think once I recreated my USB bootable drive.

EDIT: Ok, I have completely reinstalled my wifi card (by manually pointing to the folder from device manager rather than using the provided installer) and the crashes have now gone.

For reference the crashes seem to relate to the Dell Wireless utility as described Here. If you finding the same issues un-install the utility and reinstall the drivers directly through Device Manager (pointing to the folder the drivers are extracted to (normally C:/Dell).