Driver woes (8600m GT)

I've been looking around the internet and it seems that laptopvideo2go.com's drivers are simply mods of the current driver; they seem like they can be very unstable!

If I want to play Bioshock (even the demo) on my new Inspiron 1520 (8600M GT) will I have to download one of these "mod drivers," or would Dell provide one (I guess Nvidia doesn't provide laptop drivers)?

Are these "mod" drivers the only way to get a driver that will work with the game?

 

Try 169.01. Modding is for unsupported cards, not for playing games (mostly).

 

yes, they are modified for laptops and will give better performance in games than using dell's default

try the 169.01, they give a significant increase in performance over stock drivers such as dell's or any other companies

 

Is 169.01 as stable as the current driver?

And I'm assuming I can go back to the old driver if it doesn't work out by just reinstalling the old one or using the "rollback" Vista feature...

 

It's a great driver, what more can I say...

 

I've found 169.01 to be very stable. If you dont like then you can always go back sure, but I don't think this will be the case.

 

It's not letting me install it; it is telling me that either
a) I don't have the right drivers
and
b) I'm not running Vista 32-bit

Am I missing something?

 

If you have the x64 version download the x64 drivers and the same goes for x86.

 

I'm runnign the 32-bit version; is there an old driver that I should have deleted or something else?

 

You should always install the new one after you have uninstalled the previous driver.

 

GAH!

I unstalled the driver and now it doesn't detect that I have a video card at all!

How can I make it recognize my graphics card again!?!

 

Install the new driver or install the driver again

 

You probably forgot to download the custom .ini file as well... you need that from the laptopvideo2go.com site and you need to replace the default one in the driver folder.

 

disregard----> Sorry, I fixed the problem. <---disregard

 

Ok, i hope i am able to help you out.

LV2G don't provide "modded" drivers, instead, they provide you "modded" inf. What these inf does is basically to help desktop drivers to recognize your notebook GPU. Which mean they don't modify anything in the driver.

As far as i know, 16x.xx drivers are consider as desktop GPU drivers while 15x.xx drivers are consider as notebook GPU drivers. Where the later one does not really require modded inf to install as they are mean for notebook GPU.

However, desktop GPU drivers normally get constant update for newer games and provide better performance than notebook GPU drivers. Thus LV2G and maybe some other sites provide notebook users with modded inf in order to get the desktop driver recognize notebook GPU such as 8600"M" GT where they originally only recognize desktop GPU such as 8600 GT.

This explain why you can't install the driver and i assume that you didn't replace the original inf with the modded one.

Now, for installation guide go to this link.

I also recommend you to install this and clean your old drivers remaining file away after you uninstall it before you installing the new one. Make sure you uninstall the driver, restart, boot in safe mode, run the cleaner, restart and install the driver.

All these information are based on what i know and they might be incorrect. Thus feel free to point them out.

[EDIT]

Typo