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Nvidia 8800GT + Win7 Driver Hell

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ghost's Avatar

ghost

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OK so here's my problem:

I'm running Win7x64 on a computer with a GeForce 8800GT card. I installed 7 about a month ago, and had no problem with video for a while. The video drivers installed without an issue and all was fine until about 2 weeks ago. Suddenly, I had no 3D acceleration. Windows reports a code 43 "Windows has stopped this device because it has reported problems. (Code 43)" for the device. I have tried uninstalling the drivers, rebooting into safe mode, and installing the most recent drivers from Nvidia (266.58) to no avail. The drivers that Windows automatically download also result in a code 43.

I'm not sure if there are leftover components of old drivers still active on the system causing a conflict, or what. I have only ever had this problem on Windows 7, though this machine has run 7 before for over a year with no problem. Has anyone had any similar experiences? Any suggestions?

Thanks!

EDIT:

So it turned out Windows had been repeatedly installing a new driver on top of the fragments of the old one left over from uninstalls. Ugh. Gonna turn that off. I feel like a moron <_<

EDIT:

I can get the drivers to work after a reinstall for about 20 minutes. Even sitting idle after logging in, the computer freezes after a few minutes after installing graphics drivers. It's about time for an upgrade anyway, so I'll probably just buy a new card and see if I can get this one to work in my other box.


j4m32's Avatar

j4m32

Member
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Graphics drivers are very problematic of late, nVidia or ATi and one of the most common issues is installing drivers as they intend you to - which they don't really state clearly anywhere.

I have had problems jumping drivers with ATi cards. So I had 10.4 at one point and by the time I had noticed new drivers were out was 10.9. Going from 10.4->10.9 killed it. So I had to uninstall Catalyst, roll back the driver from Device Manager, install each version from 10.4 to 10.9 to get it to install correctly.

Now I have random CPU halts as well as Adobe Flash not liking YouTube etc and freezing, which I think are graphics driver related rather than CPU related - suggests video decoding accelerated by the GPU, but still trying to find some sign that this is the problem.

Jim,


ghost's Avatar

ghost

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I think I found something related to the problem.

Right after posting that it was fixed, I tried to play Left 4 Dead 2 on Steam. Valve just released a new beta map, and trying to run a game in it (both the first time, which caused this problem) and again today caused the computer to freeze. Upon reboot, the graphics were fucked again.

I think I need to prevent Windows from automatically installing drivers and then do a clean install of the Nvidia ones. I'm worried that there might be an actual hardware problem, though as of yet I don't really have any way to test that.

One thing I have noticed, however, is that there are green horizontal line video artifacts on my bios splash screen. They've been there only since this problem began.