NVIDIA Display Drivers

[Lord]

I'm having a huge problem with my computer. Yesterday, I updated my NVIDIA Display Drivers through the windows update page. It made my games really messed up. Someone helped me out, told me to download and install GeForce 53.03, and then everything should be fine. I did that, restarted my computer, opened up 1 of my games, and it was fine. I opened up another game, and it's still screwed up. I want to remove all this NVIDIA crap that I updated and installed, but I don't know what to do.

I'm running Windows XP, version 2002.

When I right click on my desktop, chose properties, then settings, I see:

Display:
Plug and Play Monitor on NVIDIA GeForce4 MX 420

I used to have some sort of NVIDIA program, and everything worked fine. When I updated, everything got screwed up. When I installed a different version, everything got worse. Some programs that I open minimize after I open them. I try to restore it again, and it minimizes again. It takes forever to get it to work. I'm trying to open Demise: Rise of the Ku'tan currently, and this is the problem I'm having. I'm running it in D3D.

I don't know what video card I have, and I dunno how to find out either.

I basically want to remove the update I made and the GeForce 53.03 that I just installed so that everything is back to normal. How can I do that?

BTW, if you can help out, please keep in mind that I'm computer illiterate. So please keep the computer talk simple for me [img]smile.gif[/img] .

[ 01-11-2004, 03:20 PM: Message edited by: Lord ]

[andrewas]

You very likely have a Nvidia GeForce4 MX 420. You have my sympathies, the MX line have never been all that hot for gaming.

The problem is that windows update is less than perfect when it comes to installing drivers, and you probably have two sets of them conflicting or some such nonsense.

Go into your control panel, system, device manager, graphics adapters, and delete the graphics card. Reset, and let it isntall the basic graphics driver when it asks you to. Then re-install the 53.03 drivers, which are the best available for this card so you may as well try them.

If that fails, version 45.23 was good as well, so download and try that. Do not try and use the winXP standard driver for games. It will probably work, just very very badly.

[philip]

I think you can find it in the software option under your configuration. Go to start - setting configuration. Choose software. For me there's a NVIDIA .... in the list (I have another card so the dots). Select and click remove. It will reinstall.

This will remove ALL drivers, so I think you need to download older ones. If you want to make sure you have the right ones, let Windows download them. It's somewhere in the options in your configuration screen but I can't find the right option, due to M$ I always stumble upon those things but can't find them when I need them.

If you want to know which video card you have, you can see it when your computer starts up, it comes by really quick so you have to look quick.Otherwise your system documentation might have something on the video card.

Edit: seems there's a better way to do it and my names don't correspond well with the english ones.

[ 01-11-2004, 03:44 PM: Message edited by: philip ]

[andrewas]

With Nvidia's unified driver, the latest 53.03 driver is good for every card back to the old TNT2s.

[Lord]

Originally posted by andrewas: You very likely have a Nvidia GeForce4 MX 420. You have my sympathies, the MX line have never been all that hot for gaming. The problem is that windows update is less than perfect when it comes to installing drivers, and you probably have two sets of them conflicting or some such nonsense. Go into your control panel, system, device manager, graphics adapters, and delete the graphics card. Reset, and let it isntall the basic graphics driver when it asks you to. Then re-install the 53.03 drivers, which are the best available for this card so you may as well try them. If that fails, version 45.23 was good as well, so download and try that. Do not try and use the winXP standard driver for games. It will probably work, just very very badly.

I followed this up to device manager. After that, I see 'Display Adapters,' not graphics adapter. NVIDIA GeForce4 MX 420 is listed there. You want me to delete that? If I do that, all data for my computer will stay, right? It's not like when you reformat your computer, you lose your data, right???

[andrewas]

Display adapters, graphics adapters, whatever. Delete it. It will remove the drivers for the card, everything else should be safe.

[Lord]

It failed to uninstall because my computer needs it to start up. I ended up having to do a system restore. I was on hold for an hour with Dell, then they transfered me, on hold for another 30 min, then transfered me again, so I waited for over 2 hours just to have the Dell people tell me to do a system restore.

[Ronn_Bman]

The problem I had with installing the drivers for a Geforce2 400MX on my son's rig was that, upon reboot, XP installed the driver without asking me anything. Everytime I'd uninstall and reboot, I'd have the same problem. It never stopped to ask me about installing, it just installed the driver I'd purposely removed. Even after uninstalling and then running the 53.xx setup up! Finally, I went to device manager>hardware> graphics and choose to update the driver. It allowed me to point out where the 53.xx driver was, and it's been fine since.

You may want to try this in order to be able to use the latest driver (if you're feeling lucky) after setting another system restore point. Even better, if for some reason it doesn't work, you should be able to roll back to the driver that you know is good without using system restore.