NVIDIA Drivers
The most up-to-date information for this article can be found on the main blog under the Home page which is currently following the progress on this matter.
The worst thing about spanking new stuff as many would agree are driver problems, and rest assured ill put the mostly likely culprit down to graphics hardware and software!
Now in my current PC as mentioned elsewhere youll find Vista in its 64bit guise as my one and only operating system, so at the end of the day, no i havnt got the most ‘popular’ of OS’s installed. Shame really as we dont get the full benefit of 64bit and probably wont for a long time.
Anyway id like to share the following here, and if your reading this and can offer any advice, please give me a shout 
My ‘rig’ is currently running two ASUS GeForce 8800GTX cards in SLI and have been under the 158.24 Forceware Drivers for some time. OK these drivers have been known to be a bit bodged, not 100% stable or provide full support, and im not going to whinge and call NVIDIA scum who dont give a toss about the customer… come on, theres an infinite amount of scenarios that their equipment and software has to tie in with, not everyone is going to be perfect in the opening credits!
As of late i noticed a new and Windows WHQL certified driver was up for current release, so naturally i downloaded it, along with an nForce update to 15.01, stripped the lot and reinstalled with the new softwares.
Now looking at the release notes, a lot of the problems i have being getting seem to have been addressed, which is great! Specifically for Battlefield2 and Command And Conquer 3 aswell as a few other bits and bobs and further, more modes are now supported.
However under these new WHQL drivers im finding that the display driver is crashing in a somewhat spectacular style, which at one point felt like it was being caused by IE7, as it seemed to go nuts when i was surfing the net? Although also completely random… i cannot put a time or specific web page on when it will happen, after a few days though it came to the fact that IE7 may not be totally to blame as i had a few random occurance with no specific program or task running?
Basically the driver crashed, and then Vista attempts to recover the crash by restarting the graphics service which i believe to be NvSvc although the constant loop of crash-and-recover with the screen flickering on and off made reading any error reports rather tricky!
I got to the point where this was no longer a ‘teething problem’ so i have dumped 162.22 in favour for the older 158.24, which i know crashes sometimes in game (C+C3 suffers mostly) but stays stable to an extent other than that!
A shame really as 162.22 offered me solutions for high performance stuff, but has no hope of running the desktop it would seem!
If anyone has a possible solution for improving the performance using this driver or if i may have a conflict somewhere, then please let me know as id like to get my currently paperweight grpahics cards up to their full potential!
