So... I have a GTX 460 Graphics card on a 64 bit operating system and I have an outdated graphics card driver on my card. This driver causes a whole bunch of little problems that have been progressively getting worse. For starters it often "crashes", when the driver crashes it causes the screen to go completely black for a few seconds, then it loads up the screen again and a message from windows pops up saying "This driver crashed but windows recovered it". It did this about once a month, then once a week and now it's doing it about 3 or 4 times a day. It's just a minor problem, but yesterday it got very bad. I was screen sharing on skype when it crashed, the crash caused my entire computer to crash and it was unable to boot into windows (everytime it did it would crash again). I was forced to boot in safe mode, uninstall the driver then reinstall it.
Here's the weirder problem, I can't update it. It's a Nvidia driver and so I've gone to Nvidia website to try and install later drivers but they never work, this has been a recurring problem because I needed to update my drivers for Battlefield 3. All drivers seem to not work, the problem is this. The installer works fine, checks computer compatibility and says my computer is compatible and continues. It removes parts of my old driver (which causes my driver to stop working) then proceeds to install the new driver, it fails installing the new driver and simply gives an unhelpful error message akin to "Something went wrong during the install! Please wait and run the installer again later" (I tried it and nothing changed and again this issue has been happening since BF3 was released). The worst part is, it doesn't bother to install my old driver so I LOSE my old driver and the only way to reinstall is through windows update (which works). Windows update however says I'm on the latest driver even though it's clearly outdated. I don't mind the minor crashes but when it's causing my entire computer to crash, that's a problem..
...what do?
SPECS:
Manufacturer Gigabyte Technology Co., Ltd.
Model X58A-UD3R
Total amount of system memory 6.00 GB RAM
System type 64-bit operating system
Number of processor cores 4
Storage
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Total size of hard disk(s) 1923 GB
Disk partition (C:) 2 GB Free (60 GB Total)
Media drive (
) CD/DVD
Disk partition (E:) 779 GB Free (1863 GB Total)
Graphics
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Display adapter type NVIDIA GeForce GTX 460
Total available graphics memory 3839 MB
Dedicated graphics memory 1024 MB
Dedicated system memory 0 MB
Shared system memory 2815 MB
Display adapter driver version 9.18.13.2723
Primary monitor resolution 1680x1050
DirectX version DirectX 10