Weird things with my laptop

[U-95]

I've a Toshiba Satellite A500-18Q with Windows 7 Home Premium (and Ubuntu 10.10, but it does nothing to see with this) and a Nvidia GT-230M graphic card.

At first, the card worked flawlessly. All games I installed (Silent Hunter III -with mods- & IV, both Neverwinter Nights with their expansions, etc) went as expected. One day, however, both SHIII and SHIV ceased to work. When booting the first one, you'd get a black screen -sound worked OK well-; the second one gave a registry error and didn't boot.
I installed the latest Nvidia drivers and, not only it did not repaired anything but NWN2 appeared also garbled. Formatted and reinstalled everything for unrelated reasons and everything worked properly until SHIII started to give the same black screen problems (haven't tested SHIV). Again, I installed the latest Nvidia drivers and again everything the black screen (however, NWN2 so far I've tested it works 100% OK).

Do you know what could be happening -if it's a problem of software or the graphic card itself-?. Strangely, it just affects those two Ubisoft games and not NWN2. Alas, I remember before updating the graphic driver to have often the screen going black for less than a second a returning to normal -without playing anything-, one time with a Windows error about the Nvidia driver failing. After the update, I had that at least the blackout one time.

[Feil]

Is your Nvidia software forcing antialiasing / anistropy / other graphical improvements? Make sure you are leaving all of those things to the video game software, e.g. turning all those things off. I don't have an Nvidia card anymore so I can't tell you exactly how, but there should be an icon in your notification tray (the set of icons next to the clock on the bottom right) that gives you access to your Nvidia driver software.

[Feil]

Oh, and have you tried launching in xp compatibility mode?

[U-95]

Done and Silent Hunter III works as it should. Great thanks!.