For the love of god, I need a stable nVidia driver!

I have been tearing my hair out over this one. My 6831 crashes in the nvidia driver very frequently, sometimes even when the desktop is coming up for the first time. I have been unable to find a driver which allows me to run 3DMark 06 or Call of Duty 4 even once.

I actually bought this laptop because my MacBook Pro, which I normally use for work, has the same problem, and I tried even more drivers with that laptop.

So, if you have a known stable driver version, please let me know which one and where you found it (I assume everyone gets theirs from laptopvideo2go). I see so many of you talking about 3DMark scores, and I have never been able to get it to run once with 2 totally different laptops with nvidia chips.

I have both Vista and XP installed right now with the 174.74 drivers. I am not doing any sort of overclocking, either. When I do a driver install I make certain to boot into safe mode and run ccleaner and driversweep, so I don't think it's a mix of drivers. In fact, my XP partition has only ever had the 174.74 drivers installed from the xp driver pack.

The laptop has been upgraded to 4GB of RAM and dual 250GB drives in a RAID 0 configuration.

Any advice would be very welcome!

 

What happens with your stock drivers? Mine has been very stable with COD4, but no dual boot or Raid at this time. You might want to back it down to single OS and get everything stable before Raid 0. AFAIK, no one has seen and great jumps in FPS or leaps of stability to go with 174.xx drivers but many belive so do it anyway.

 

Hydra,

I installed 3D Mark 06 using the drivers that come on the restore disk and still crashed and had half the frame rate I get with other drivers. On top of that, the chipset was reported as an 8800M GT not a GTS.

I was smart enough to copy an image of the original shipping drives, but stupid enough to use Acronis 11 to do it. Now I am waiting for a version that supports the intel raid chipset used on this laptop.

I am really hoping someone out there has a driver out there that they have used for COD4 and 3DMark 06 for long periods of time WITHOUT crashing.

 

Did you try to use a driver cleaner program to totally remove the old drivers first? I think the program is called cc cleaner

 

My stock drivers run fine with COD4, anyone else crashing? I can't say the same with Witcher nor do i care if 3D mark 06 runs at all, but understand your frustration, sorry.

flynnaz, snowsurfer and others may jump in with specific help for you,

 

I have been using the 174.74 driver from day one on both my Lappy's with no problem. I did a fresh install of vista so I didn't have any past drivers loaded. I would really try to do a uninstall, and then "scrub" the remains of the old driver with Driver Cleaner Professional , its free and works good. Just uninstall your current video driver though control panal like you would normaly, then run Driver Cleaner Professional, select nvidia video drivers, run the program, reboot, turn off any ani-virus, and install the video driver you want. Here is the link for Driver Cleaner Professional;

http://downloads.guru3d.com/download.php?det=745

174.74 driver link:
http://downloads.guru3d.com/ForceWare-174.74-Vista-(32-bit)-WHQL-download-1887.html

 

My 174.74 link above may not be for laptops;

this is from one of my earlier posts:

Check out this link;

http://forum.notebookreview.com/showthread.php?t=204425

And this one to download the 174.74 driver

http://www.tweakforce.com/
__________________
Gateway P-171X FX (2) 200gb 7200rpm raid 0, 4gb ram
Gateway P-6831 FX (2) 250gb 5400rpm raid 0, 4gb ram
Gateway 7426 2gb ram
&
Custom built desktop
680i mobo, e6600 2.4ghz, (2)8800GTS sli, 4gb ram

 

The 174.74 driver i downloaded from Tweakforce.com was easy to install, just unzip it, and run setup, it was that easy.

 

I'm using these drivers right now. Played Lost Planet and Assassin's Creed yesterday afternoon with no problems. I tried the 170 series drivers and I like these drivers better. Graphics actually look much better and run a bit smoother (at least, to me). The driver I used is nVIDIA ForceWare X 167.58 for Windows Vista 32bit. It's has oem support for the 8800m GTS, so no modded inf file.

Here is a link: http://www.laptopvideo2go.com/forum/index.php?showtopic=16925

 

Jester, could you run 3DMark 06 on your laptop and tell me if it passes, and what score you get?

 

Fly,

It couldn't have been that easy. I took down the exact driver you have listed, after running driver cleaner and it wouldn't install. Maybe that's because they didn't have any 174.74's listed in their mobile nvidia section, just their desktop.

So, could you verify exactly where you got your drivers from and what version you are using? Look at the system information panel in the nvidia control panel, then check all of the various component versions.

Have you actually run COD4 on your laptop? What version of 3DMark 06 are you running? What version? Have you changed any of the settings in the nvidia control panel?

Are you using powermizer (I don't even know what it is, but I see lots of others mentioning it).

 

Yes I have run COD4, Everquest 2, no problems, this is where I downloaded my driver, it is a xfastest driver, sounds weard, but works great.

link;
http://www.laptopvideo2go.com/forum/index.php?showtopic=18047

 

Have you changed any of your driver settings? Are you just using the default?

What power profile do you run in the Power Settings control panel?

I am grasping at straws here. The xfastest driver was the one I used after my latest fresh install of the OS.

Anything more that you can give me other than driver version may help at this point.

 

I used the Nvidia control panal and picked let the apps decide in 3d settings, I set my power profile to max settings, other than that, I updated all my drivers from gateways support site. defraged my drives ect.

 

I use the 169.09 best driver in my opinion, tried the newer ones and keep going back, does everything well. Runs all games very well.

 

Here you go sirnh...

I think my score is slightly low, but I ran it at native resolution (1440x900). All of the other settings were default.

Need anything else, let me know.

 

Sirnh,

Here's a guy that's having the same near problem with his 8800. You guys might be able to compare notes...

http://forum.notebookreview.com/showthread.php?t=239825

 

did you check to make sure that your 3d settings are set to *application controlled* or *let the 3d application decide*?