Bioshock Demo freezes w/ NVIDIA 8600M GT

Hi everyone,

I recently bought an Inspiron 1520 with the higher-end graphics card for game development, and I wanted to try and see what kind of games could run on it. So Bioshock seemed like a good try. I downloaded the 2GB zip file from some website I googled (I'm not sure which site, so maybe the file's corrupted?) and installed the demo. Whenever I start the demo, it runs smoothly until right after the intro movie, at which point the Bioshock logo appears and gameplay probably starts. Whenever the demo gets to this point, however, the game stays in a black screen and doesn't respond.

My computer's hardware configuration is: Intel Core 2 Duo T7300 (2.0 GHz), 2GB RAM, 256MG NVIDIA GeForce 8600M GT, 80GB Hard Drive, and Windows Vista Home Premium 32-bit.

I've researched the problem, and looked at someone else's thread who had a similar problem, and the solution seems to be to update my graphics drivers (because I'm pretty sure my hardware is good enough to just run the game). So I've downloaded "163.44_forceware_winvista_32bit_english_beta.exe" and "163.67_forceware_winvista_32bit_english_beta.exe" and neither driver successfully installed. The updater either said that it found no drivers compatible with my hardware, or that I am actually not running at 32-bit operating system. What's going on, and why can I neither run the game nor install any new drivers?

 

goto www.laptopvideo2go.com and download the 163.44 drivers from there along with the modded inf. Copy the modded .inf(overwriting old one) file to the folder where you extract the drivers temporarily.

Install the drivers and enjoy BioShock.

 

Thanks! After a bit of fiddling around, it finally installed successfully.