Never uninstall Nvidia's drivers!

I just bought an 8800 GTS with 320 megs of memory, and the Nvidia site told me to uninstall the old drivers before installing the new ones.

So I did.

And all my drives got switched around.
And my ide drivers wanted to be reinstalled.
And my SM BUS driver went missing. (I don't know what that is.)
And my internet stopped working.
And I couldn't resinstall these drivers even with the Windows XP disk because the system didn't know which drive was the CD ROM and I didn't know what directory on the CD to to point it to manually.

WTF!

I don't know what my video card has to do with any of that stuff, but it screwed it all up.

Luckilly, reverting to a system restore point that was generated this morning automatically put everyhting right again. Well most everything. The driver EXE I downloded a few minutes before was deleted by the system restore. Why in the heck would system restor delete an EXE I saved in my download directory? I thought it wasn't supposed to touch my files?

In the end, I downloaded the driver again and just installed it without trying to uninstall the old one again.

I've uninstalled Nvidia's drivers lots of times (thanks to their buggy 64bit drivers) and never had anything like this happen.

Same here, but then I've never touched anything more recent than the 6x.xx series.

Sounds like you went and uninstalled all the nVidia system drivers, rather than just the display drivers! Not a good thing to do with an nForce chipset ;)

How's the 8800GTS working out though? I'm considering an upgrade.

I have a 8600 GTS, uninstalled the drivers, and reinstalled new ones, worked fine!?!?!

Dabz

vinylpusher is right. you uninstalled too many drivers ;)

i have a 8800 gts 640 MB and it runs like hell.

Is that a good or a bad hell?

sswift, do you have an nforce chipset on your motherboard? ;)

Never uninstall the nforce chipset driver! ;)

Better buy the 640mb version, else the texture bug will eat up your memory in no time. :)

I wondered that, too.

"sswifty" raises a good point here.

I had to stop and think when updating the drivers for my 8800 GTX. This was my first nVidia card and it was not exactly clear as to what you do.

I had to go as far as Googling about for a bit to work out that I just had to uninstall the graphics driver.

It sounds obvious when you think about it in hindsight - but it isn't at the time.

Shawn,

Perhaps you could have system restored - this often save my life... I only do it when I need to but when I have lost network connections and such and I have no idea why - that's what I do.

IPete2.

He did.

8800 gts its good. i am currently playing insurgency at 2560*1600 all set to high smoothly...

Right, I was ultimately considering the 8800 GTS 320MB myself, and feel it may be worth the plunge. At least it's far cheaper than the GTX counterpart, and maybe can perform as well, if not better than the GTS 640MB card, may probably see what that would look like in my build. IIRC, couldn't you overclock the 320MB version to somewhat perform to about the same level as the 640MB version?

System restore doesn't mess with any of your *data* files -- but any .EXE, .DLL and .SYS file, along with any registry changes gets 'undone' by a system restore.
I ran into that one as well, where it 'convenienetly' deleted a huge servicepack file I'd just downloaded but not installed yet...

Are you sure you haven't uninstalled motherboard/chipset drivers? Because that's what sound like happened.

He probably did Display, Ethernet, IDE and PCI Management Drivers - those are the 4 options I get.

Are you sure you didnt play in the bios? Ive never managed to do this!

What texture bug?

Yeah, that's what I did allright. I removed all the drivers, cause the options (without using the checkboxes, I don't remember what those were) were "uninstall all drivers" and "uninstall all except display driver", and I thought I had an ATI SLI chipset on my motherboard. But yep, turns out it was an NForce! Doh!

Now when I go to uninstall the driver, it no longer presents the option of removing those other drivers, and just uninstalls the video driver. I guess the only way I could get those options back would be to reinstall the motherboard drivers, but since everything is working fine, I don't think I'll mess with that.

Cygnus:
No I didn't play in the BIOS. :-) I sued to do that back in the old days when you had to, and when doing so meant you could triple your VGA card's speed, but now I don't fool around in there, it's not worth it.


As far as the 320MB version goes, the 640MB version is only available online around here. And only one store carried even the 320MB version. As far as the benchmarks go, the 320MB version is just as fast as the 640MB version. The only difference is that you'll be able to run slightly higher res textures, or run them without compression. This is according to a site which tested both on games like Prey and FEAR. Since I'd have had to wait to get the 640MB version, and it would have cost me $100 more, and I could get the 320MB version from Circuit City on sale for the same price it is online at the cheapest places, and there's little difference between the two, I decided to go for the cheaper option.

Oh and the card barely fit inside my PC. The GTX version would never have fit. And I had to change some of my power conenctors around because I have a power supply you can plug different types of connectors into, but it's only got 4 plugs on it, and I had used up all those with drive connectors, and I needed one for the PCI-E, or I would have had to use an adaptor that took 2 drive connectors instead. I've got 5 drives in my system plus a DVD-R. I guess I'll have to pull a 200gb drive out whenever I need more space. :-)

You may want to reconsider that -- the motherboard drivers also include IDE/SATA drivers, and without those your machine likely runs the generic ones which can be a lot slower than when you use the proper ones which are written for your actual chipset.

Worse, back in the 98 days I had a bunch of subtle data corruption which magically went away after installing the motherboard drivers.