G73S - Stable geforce driver?

Got a G73S as replacement for my G73J that was whacked kinda.
GeForce GTX 460M on this one.

Anyway, im having trouble finding a stable driver.
When i got the laptop i put in a SSD disc and installed win 7 x64 ultimate.
Then went to nvidia and downloaded the latest official drivers, 298.something.
Worked fine for a few weeks, then all of a sudden the driver often stopped responding, i got blue and pinking colors all over the screen, artifacts in youtube/movies etc.

Then i went to laptopvideo2go and downloaded 301.something to try.
They acted the same way instantly, didnt help me at all.

Decided to go to Asus site then and download the latest there, which was 268.something. Been working stable for awhile, but today when i got home the driver had yet again stopped responding and been "restored".
No problems in games or movies... yet...

So yeah, whats wrong with these drivers?

 

I very rarely have issues with GeForce drivers. Currently running 301.24 without issue.

Are you installing these drivers correctly? First uninstall all of the components of the old drivers through Add/Remove Programs. Restart as needed. Next boot into safe mode and run Driver Sweeper on the remnants of the drivers.

Only then should you install new ones. It's very likely that you have bits and pieces of various drivers causing problems.

 

Yes im using Driver Sweeper every time.

Doing excacly the same as your saying.

 

Do these issues show up in Safe Mode?

 

I'm testing a few things on my own laptop, and wondering if you would like to help me. I experienced unstability in all drivers except 266.58, which work somewhat decent. Others were trully a MESS.

Enter Bios, and disable the Card Reader from there. I hope you don't use it too much. Restart and check if the issues appear again. I can't remember the exact steps to disable the card reader in bios, but the option to select which parts of the mobo to disable are in the I/O option, just look around and you will find it.

After doing that change, I could install other drivers and have no freezes or weird issues. I can now enjoy 301.24 nvidia drivers and that performance boost in skyrim!

Thanks

 

No idea mate. But when ive been in there a few times i had no issues.
I havent really had any issue with 268 drivers either for the last week, beside today when i come home from work and it had stopped and restored for some reason. The only thing i had running in background was Browser, msn, skype, some small crap and FM12 in windowmode.

With newer drivers i got artifacts in movies/youtube, even after rebooting and such. After i uninstalled the drivers and got crap resolution, i skipped rebooting and right away started a movie, and it was fine...

 

Really? The cardreader? How did you come to that conclusion? Haha.
I should try it!

EDIT:
I cant find the option to turn of the cardreader. been looking in every corner i can in bios, there are not so many afterall.
Only I/O options i find is stuff like sata, camera, usb etc.

I just uninstalled my drivers, booted into safemode, ran sweeper, reboot and installed 301.24.
When the first graphictest in 3dmark vantage started, it had MASSIVE graphicerrors for about 3seconds, then the driver stopped working.
Fantastic...

 

Sorry for bumping.
But....
Now i cant even use Asus 256 driver without getting massive artifacts and screenerrors in games. Do have to RMA this ?
Im so bloddy tired of this crap. I just waited around 10 weeks while my G73J was in Asus Holland. And i cant even get a working new computer.
And yeah before that i had 3 RMAs with it.

This is a cute screenshot rom Civ5. To give you an idea.
http://img401.imageshack.us/img401/991/civ51.jpg
The funny thing is that it worked good for a few weeks. What has happend?

 

They should be there. You need to read the option as "Lock" for the change to take effect. If you can't find them, try disabling them from device manager. But trust me, the option is in the BIOS.

I came to this solution after doing a lot of hardware checks. HDD, CPU, GPU, RAM, ODD, all came clean. After several clean installs, I always had lock ups, even on stock drivers, so I knew the culprit would be the mobo or something related to it.

After a lot of tinkering, I decided to dwell in the bios, found the I/O options and decided to uncheck one by one and see if one of those actually fixed something. First try was Card Reader and here I am running my laptop with no freezes for several hours (around 6 hours of nonstop activity with games/photoshop/browsing/music).

 

Would it be possible for you mate to take a camerashot of your bios where the cardreader option is? All i can find is Sata, USB, Camera, Bluetooth and something else.

 

The option should be right below those IIRC, or there should be another option below those that will take you to another set of options where you should find the Card Reader. I'm downloading League of Legends (2Gb download) so it will be a while before I can take that screenshot, I apologize for that.

Edit: BTW, just for the record, I'm running an Asus G73SW-XT1, with Bios 205.

 

Well. Its not in my bios. Need to check if i have latest version.

Every game or 3dmark i open now ends up crashing after a serious of graphicerrors.
I have tried 4 different drivers, so tired of this. :'(

 

Sorry I couldn't post yesterday. Go to Security, then I/O Access Ports IIRC.

You should find them there, I haven't actually checked on my own PC, since it was left patching LoL I have not arrived home yet =/

 

I'm pretty sure you have a faulty GPU, the problems are just temporarily gone by coincidence.

The latest driver is the most stable.

 

It is weird cos sometimes I can run my laptop for hours, playing and such. This weekend I could play COD, crysis 2 or League of Legends all I wanted, even for several hours at a time.

This means that sometimes I get a good boot, others it's just screwed... This is weird, I'm still suspecting a driver conflict.

Btw, I re-enabled my SD card reader since I had to use it yesterday, and it's been all right for now, left my G73 on overnight copying some files, woke up this morning and have been using it since, with no errors at all.

 

Did you overclock your GPU? If you did, what are your clocks? It causes artifacts and makes the driver go unstable sometimes.

 

Ive tried a few more drivers, together with sweeper, ccleaner and everything.
I cant even start a game before the screen goes completly bizzare.

Its time for me to RMA i guess.

 

I haven't overclocked my machine. I would never OC a laptop, moral thing for me xD

I actually underclock it, by a few Mhz just to let my machines age properly and not have to change them every once in a while.

OT: I enabled the card reader again, since I had another lock up yesterday. Nothing is working it seems... But yet, I'm determined this issues are driver related.

Edit: Shajjer, if you RMA your machine, could you tell me what did they change to fix the issue? I want to RMA this thing but since I'm in Mexico, I will need to tell those guys exactly what I need.

 

So anyway. To prepare for RMA i remove the SSD and did the Asus restore on my XT 500gig disc.
I just installed 3dmarks vantage, and guess what...
It went through perfecly. Am i just lucky? Dont dare to update drivers.