Graphical Corruption

[Steel]

I just updated my laptop video card drivers and I now see graphical corruption in windows.

There is a low level of static over the whole screen. Randomly there are small patches of a few pixels that are very quickly flashing random colours. The disturbances seem to come in waves, being very apparent for a minute or two and then dying down for another few minutes. Also, every few minutes the screen very briefly flickers black. None of the individual static or the black flicker lasts more than 1 frame individually.

This problem appeared a year or so when I tried to update the drivers to the then current version, so I went back to the old, old version that actually worked. Unfortunately now some newer things don't work properly with the old drivers, so I'd obviously prefer to be able to use the newer ones. This problem is certainly not present with the older drivers.

I am also unable to printscreen with any of the corruption. All screenshots appear to have all pixels correct.

Bizarrely it seems that fullscreen 3d applications work fine with no corruption though.

Card is a Geforce 9650M GT in windows vista. Current drivers are the latest ones from the website, as chosen by the automatic selection, and they are named the appropriate things for my system. The old version I was using that actually worked was: 179.48. The version I tried a year ago may have been something like 19x.yz.

Anybody have any idea what this is and how to fix it? I think I posted on the NVIDIA forums when this happened a year or so ago, but that got precisely fuck all help.

[Mr Bean]

Who made your laptop? Because with laptop's it's sometimes smarter to go with Dell or HP's video card drivers than the generic Nvidia driver due to the non-standard nature of all laptops.

[Steel]

Who made your laptop? Because with laptop's it's sometimes smarter to go with Dell or HP's video card drivers than the generic Nvidia driver due to the non-standard nature of all laptops.

Ah, intriguing.

It was made by people called Rock Direct. I think they went out of and then back into business since I've got the laptop. Looking at the website there is a section for drivers for my specific laptop. I'll see if they are just the original ones or a more up to date set.

If these are just the ancient ones that came with the laptop, what options do I have for getting newer ones that actually work?

[atg]

I've always just used drivers from the graphics chip manufacturer. That being said all my laptops have had either intel or ati graphics chips - no nvidia.

[Steel]

Ok, after looking through many threads on the rock support forums I came to this one:

http://www.rockforum.co.uk/viewtopic.ph ... c&start=20

Which has a bunch of people with exactly the same problem. The found:

http://forum.novatech.co.uk/showthread. ... TED*/page2

which gives a set of drivers that actually work.

(Although it seems there was only a brief period where the drivers do work as the last post in the thread has someone complaining that the most recent release has broken everything again... but for now it appears I have a working nearly modern set of drivers).

Thanks for the input anyway guys. At least I now know that I wasn't just screwing things up last year, there actually is a problem and the solution didn't exist until more recently than that.