Win10 NP700Z5C Code 43 Nvidia GT640M error and freeze

I refurbished one of these earlier in the year and upgraded it to Windows 10 (64-bit Home) with an SSD. It's been working fine, with all the shortcut hotkeys working, until the recipient (my brother) noticed last week that the Nvidia control panel had disappeared. He attempted to update the Nvidia drivers, resulting in a Code 43 error and the disabling of the Nvidia card in Device Manager.

I've walked him through DDU, some safe mode cleaning and reinstallation of the drivers. During the installation process the computer hung up, required a hard reset and finally claimed it was complete. The Code 43 has now disappeared, Speccy and Device Manager both report a working GT640m but there is no Nvidia control panel in the system tray, nor a way to access it through right-clicking the desktop.

The laptop now freezes shortly after starting up, requiring a hard reset. I've attached some minidumps if that's of assistance. I don't know about interpreting them myself, but will investigate.

Any ideas?

 

Had it been an AMD model, I would have said the Microsoft/Windows provided drivers are to blame: On my older NP700Z3A (Radeon HD 6490M) the Microsoft-provided drivers hang with a black screen for a minute or longer during boot. It can be solved by disabling EnableULPS in registry, but then the AMD runs all the time, wasting a lot of battery. That's why I use way old Leshcat drivers.

BUT... since you're on Nvidia, I doubt that is the problem. They've been much better driver wise as we moved through newer Windows versions. My first bet is that the Nvidia chip is blown (which can happen). But since it now shows up in Device Manager, one would think that it's there.

My suggestion is to uninstall anything Nvidia in Programs & Features. THEN Uninstall/Delete the device in Device Manager and choose Delete the driver software for this device, and repeat that until you no longer get the choice. Now we're back to Windows native drivers. Reboot. Now install Nvidia drivers anew.

That's all I got

 

Thank you. Currently he's running it having uninstalled the Nvidia, which has prevented the freezing/crashing. Restarting doesn't automatically make Windows notice there's a driverless component, but there is an exclamation mark next to a "Xeon(R) processor E3 - 1200 v2/3rd Gen Core processor PCI Express Root Port - 0151". As the NP700Z5C has an i7 this is confusing me. The latest Nvidia drivers (2019 sometime - 425.x) get the Code 43 error.

I can't find the folder I made of the drivers I used for the initial setup (though I seem to remember setting up an F4 recovery partition so they should be there as the last resort). Do you know what would be a suitable Win10 driver for the GT640m? Of course using Samsung Update gets the 7/8.1 drivers for the original Z5C, but I remember using another model that had the right driver and downloading the files through the update programme.