Reinstalling Nvidia driver (GeForce6100-M9)

[librehombre]

My system has been freezing for over a week and I believe I have finally chased the problem down to the Nvidea driver for my Biostar mobo. This board was installed down here in Mexico because of the time and expense that would have been involved in replacing the original HP mobo. The system worked fine for about one month then I started getting system locks.

Looking in the Event Log I found I could correlate the lockups with the following entries:

The NVIDIA Display Driver Service service terminated unexpectedly. It has done this 1 time(s).

So after a lot of time trying to decipher information on the nvidia web site I finally concluded I should install this driver:

162.18_forceware_winxp_32bit_english_whql.exe

Question 1. Is this the correct driver for the GeForce 6100.m9? I guess if it is not I should get an error message.

Question 2. Should I remove the current drivers. This is recommended by Nvidia, but if I uninstall the current driver and something goes amiss with the installaition of the new drivers will I be screwed?

The local HP representative that installed my replacement board seems qualified and the company were very accommodating, but only the owner of the store understands and speaks English and I find it very hard to try and explain my concerns to his staff technicians in my limited Spanish. Plus taking it back means several days wait time for the repair. I have already lost a lot of time on this.

What should I do? Install the above driver package?

Thanks for any advice.

Rich
PS
I note that this forum can also be accessed in Spanish. I think I will start reading the posts in Spanish and get better educated. The spanish one needs for PC computing is a lot different than what you use at the local cantina to order a beer.

 

[mailpup]

It appears to be the correct driver if you have Windows XP, 32bit. You didn't say what OS you had.

Yes, definitely uninstall the old driver. You never want to install a new graphics driver on top of an old one. Don't be concerned if you end up with no nVidia driver. Windows has a basic generic driver that will kick in so you have a display on your monitor.

Have the new driver on hand in advance. Uninstall the old driver, reboot. When Windows wants to look for a graphics driver, cancel it. Find your new downloaded driver and install it.

 

[librehombre]

Many thanks -- I will let you know what happens.

 

[librehombre]

Installed Nvidea drivers as advised - still freezing

I tried to religiously follow all the information I had about installing the driver (which I thought was corrupted based on analyzing Event Viewer logs). The process did not go well and in fact left my computer unable to connect to the internet and if anything misbehaving even worse. At one time I could not get it to boot at all.

I took the box to my local HP dealer who after a few minutes looking at the problem decided to roll back to several days earlier that I elected. Back at home, I was able to reconnect to my ISP, but freeze problem was still there.

In my research I learned about the utility, TUT, that I decided to use to try to sort out system conflicts. After about a day of carefully stopping processes and stopping programs from starting (went from about 60 odd running processes to 41) my system is more stable, but alas I still experience occasional freeze ups.

The difference is that my Event Viewer logs are far cleaner than they were. So clean in fact that now after a freeze I cannot find anything at all alarming in the logs -- no yellow or red events. Big change from where I was a week ago.

I have run ScanDisk and it comes up clean. Deleted several gigs of stored files, defragged, etc, etc. I have cleaned out the registry using System Mechanic 7 latest edition. I have used Zone Alarm (with all the most recent definitions) to scan and it comes up clean. Oh, I also uninstalled everything I did not absolutely think I need. At one time, posts I was reading on the net implicated Win Defender, so out the door that went.

The only issues I am aware of now are the failure of Adobe Photoshop Album Starter edition to uninstall (sent report as requested), and some programs (including Technotes forums software) display some items in Spanish. Which I do put down to corruption somewhere, but this is a minor issue now.

I'm stumped. How do I rid myself of freezeups? Is there a dump or something someone might evaluate for me?

Thanks,
Rich

 

[mailpup]

At some point it is easier and less time consuming to reformat the hard drive and reinstall Windows and start off with a clean machine. Of course, you will have to save any data off your PC first. As you reinstall your programs take note of your PC's behavior in case one of the programs is the source of the problem.

One advantage of a clean machine is if the freezing problem continues, it would seem to point to a hardware problem.

 

[librehombre]

I hear what you are saying, but this is personal now! I know I have made progress towards fixing this problem, and I will not throw in the towel yet.

Thanks for your assistance.
Rich

 

[mailpup]

Did you remove all of your old system restore points? Sometimes hidden malware remains saved in there.

Also, you might want to run a Windows repair. In all the melee, perhaps some files got deleted that shouldn't have or were corrupted somehow. Just a thought.

 

[librehombre]

I'll have to check the restore point dates, but I can remove all of them and create a current one and see what happens. I'll also try repairing Windows after I get a good fresh backup in place.