If you've followed this blog for a while you know that I've been having major, major video driver problem under Vista with my Laptop and the nVidia GO 7800 card. All sorts of problems with very frequent driver crashes and worst of all dual monitors not working at all (well, not working in native resolutions of the two displays 1900x1200 and 1600x1050). I've been on the treadmill with various nVidia drivers, and while some are better than others I've had just about no luck with dual monitors.

This week Microsoft quietly released two patches. They're not coming down with Microsoft Update (why the hell not???) and there's hasn't been much fanfare around these things which seems odd since some of the problems discussed seem to be pretty major.

There's this one:

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/938979/en-us

which patches various desktop and media related issues. And this one:

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/938194/en-us

which lists a bunch of issues related to video driver and GPU problems. If you read the list of issues resolved, it reads almost exactly like every single one of the symptoms I've been having with my machine from frequent crashes (especially with WPF/DirectX 10 content), GPU related activities and even the DVI and multi-monitor scenarios.

I installed the first patch yesterday not realizing the second one was available and it actually fixed most of my original video crashing issues with Explorer/Picture Viewer and a few other things that would frequently bomb the video driver. Today I found the second patch and installed that as well with high hopes because it looks like it's addressed at my particular scenario.

And the verdict is.... drum roll...

Not so fast!!!

I installed the update rebooted and hooked up my second monitor and immediately the video driver crashed once again. So I'm going - "SHIT! No change." But I left the machine to cylce for about 2 minutes through driver crash after driver crash, but it eventually came up with both monitors! And even in the correct resolution.

And it's still working after a few hours of working off and on, letting the machine go to sleep, shutting the lid and reopening. No crashes on any WPF content - in fact since original install there have been no more video crashes running with Aero.

So far this is looked very promising.

Then comes the acid test - shut the machine down and restart. And here things get ugly again. Video drivers immediately crash again with dual displays but this time they're not coming back even after 10 minutes of cycling.

So I let it be for the time being. Now I thought I'd give this one more try - hooked up the second monitor with DVI again and immediately the driver goes on crashing. Just for kicks I closed the lid and reopened the lid again and without hesitation the second monitor kicks in. Whoa.

The machines been running fine with dual monitors now for a few hours working on a WPF app no less which was a guaranteed crash scenario for me previously.

So there are definitely some improvements but there are still major issues obviously. It looks a little more promising at least. I know now that it's definitely not a hardware issue and most likely a problem in Vista rather than the nVidia drivers.

In case anybody's wondering here's my setup:

Dell Inspiron 9400 (2Ghz Core Duo, 2gig, 100gig HD)
nVidia Go 7800  (Driver: 101.41)

The driver above has been the most stable out of all the drivers I've tried by far.