Follow Nvidia Installation instructions for vista drivers!!

[Acanthus]

1. Uninstall your current drivers by going to the device manager and hitting "uninstall hardware". Check the delete driver box.

2. Reboot and enter SAFE MODE this prevents windows from haphazardly installing whatever driver it feels like.

3. Extract and install the new drivers.

This process takes less than 5 minutes on any vista-worthy machine, I was one of the "just install over the old drivers" guys until the most recent betas.

Following the correct procedure fixed:

-System hangs on start up and shut down. (i thought vista just started up and shut down slow until doing this the right way)
-Crashing in Civ4
-Crashing in Freelancer
-Crashing in Supreme Commander
-Failing stock speed stress tests in ATi Tools.

Just a heads up, people who reccomend this procedure are not "overly cautious" like back in the WinXP and Win2k days. It will screw things up.

 

[PCTC2]

thanks. i will have to try this b/c I had to roll back drivers after I updated them and i thought it was just the drivers, but I guess it was me.

 

[Ackmed]

This is pretty common knowledge. A lot of "driver problems" people have, are user created because they pile drivers on top of each other. Sadly, its all too common in this day and age.

 

[Acanthus]

Originally posted by: Ackmed
This is pretty common knowledge. A lot of "driver problems" people have, are user created because they pile drivers on top of each other. Sadly, its all too common in this day and age.

This never happened to me in 2k or XP. I probably did it hundreds of times.

 

[nullpointerus]

Technically, Vista is supposed to be able to update video drivers without restarting. This is one of the features of the new driver model.

The rest of the installation routine for nVidia and ATI drivers involves installing supporting software like .NET, their various control panels, etc. In other words, it's all software, and "[piling] drivers on top of each other" is only a problem when the nVidia/ATI driver setup program has bugs. Following the "official" (i.e. safe mode) procedure just bypasses these kinds of bugs entirely. But ideally, the bugs themselves should be fixed.

FWIW, I had one problem when upgrading an old set of ATI Catalyst drivers in Vista, but not when upgrading the last few (7.7, 7.8, 7.9).

 

[Yanagi]

Standard Microsoft procedure is

1) Add new feutore to new OS
2) Let the next OS handle said feature properly
3) profit!

Remember Win98SE2 and USB support?

 

[Ackmed]

Originally posted by: Acanthus

Originally posted by: Ackmed
This is pretty common knowledge. A lot of "driver problems" people have, are user created because they pile drivers on top of each other. Sadly, its all too common in this day and age.

This never happened to me in 2k or XP. I probably did it hundreds of times.

Yet it happened to many other people. Installing drivers on top of other drivers is not good. Which is exactly why both NV, and ATi both tell you to uninstall the old ones first.

 

[nullpointerus]

Originally posted by: Ackmed

Originally posted by: Acanthus

Originally posted by: Ackmed
This is pretty common knowledge. A lot of "driver problems" people have, are user created because they pile drivers on top of each other. Sadly, its all too common in this day and age.

This never happened to me in 2k or XP. I probably did it hundreds of times.

Yet it happened to many other people. Installing drivers on top of other drivers is not good. Which is exactly why both NV, and ATi both tell you to uninstall the old ones first.

Yet you are not installing drivers "on top of" other drivers anymore. nVidia and ATI's drivers include an upgrade option that invokes the uninstaller of the existing version before installing the new version. Really, other software packagers have been doing this for ages. The fact that nVidia and ATI still can't get it right in 2007 is due to lack of interest.

 

[nitromullet]

The fact that nVidia and ATI still can't get it right in 2007 is due to lack of interest.

I agree 100%. If I'm installing the new NVIDIA driver for the same card over the old NVIDIA driver and NVIDIA can post the correct procedure for installation on their website, why can't they just make the new driver do what it's supposed to do in the first place? It can't be that hard for the NVIDIA driver development team to write a small program that removes old NVIDIA driver files that might conflict with the new ones...

 

[cputeq]

Ya know, didn't Nvidia drivers used to do that anyway? Autouninstall?

In fact, I *know* they used to. A while back I ran a driver update, it spits up the "old drivers found, uninstalling" and proceeded to auto-uninstall the previous version drivers. Why they don't do that now I have no idea.