EXTREMELY ANNOYING Driver Problem (?)

Howdy,

I have recently purchased the laptop seen in my sig and immediately uninstalled the stock drivers and replaced them with the much celebrated 163.44 drivers from laptopvideo2.go. I replaced the modded inf. as required and have done everything correctly.

I am now, however, experiencing extremely annoying hitches in game, with frequent (though irregular) pauses while playing (often lasting between 1-2 mins; games DO resume after this). I am experienceing this in all games; FEAR, BioShock (demo), Stalker.. sometimes even when just browsing through my files (ie - no apps running). It also occured yesterday whilst running WMP which froze compelety, lost sound and then the screen went BLACK. The lappy required a reboot.

I have also tried 158.45 (the best so far, but still not perfect), 163.16 and 163.14 to no avail. It is extremely annoying.

I will also mention that i have disabled a lot of system processes (aiming to conserve system resources). Could this be the problem? I am not a complete n00b and as far as my knowledge goes have not disabled any which relate to the drivers or are crucial to normal operation.

Ill also point out that I have not (as of yet) had the opppourtunity to connect to the net on it (typing this from my desktop) and have not yet run the latest windows updates. (so im running windows vista, straight out of the box.) Is this an issue?

I am about to try the xtremeG drivers but am not hopefull at all...

Please excuse any techincal inaccuracies in my 'essay' (above) if there are any.

Id really appreciate the help.

Cheerz, AL.

EDIT: Only once have i seen the 'driver has stopped responding' message displayed, despite the fact that these hitches are quite frequent. Dees this suggest something else is the problem? (although i have been in game when the hitches have occured so maybe this is why i havnt seen them?)

UPDATE: have installed ALL Vista updates - problem persists.

NOTE: After extensive googling it appears that a lot of others have the same kind of problem... only they all seem to think its caused by different factors. Could it just be a vista bug?

 

Can anyone help? Please?

 

Had a similar problem but not quite as extreme - game would hang for a couple of seconds every minute. Installed 163.14 and now works fine altho 3dmark scores dropped a bit but at least games play properly!