Ok, I'm pretty much at the end of my rope here. I've been dealing with nVidia's lousy Vista drivers now for nearly a year and officially Vista will now have been released for 4 months with RTM for over a half a year. What are those bozos doing at nVidia that they can't create drivers in over a half a year's worth of time? All drivers that nVidia to date has released are BETA drivers.
There's a steady stream of beta drivers that keep getting kicked out that are only minimally improved but still continue to crash my video card on a regular basis. It's pathetic especially given the fact that I shelled out $200 extra dollars for this crappy video card that's worthless without decent drivers (and had to be replaced once by Dell to complete hardware failure of the card).
How is is that a major hardware manufacturer that has millions of cards out there cannot produce a reliable video driver in a year. Especially given that nVidia has a unified driver model that's supposed to be a one size fits all? Do they just don't care that there are a bunch of pissed off people out there that will try as hard as possible not to buy another nVidia card? That's a great business model to go by! Or do they just figure it'll get blamed on Microsoft or some hardware vendor? We're not talking about a low cost component here either - it's not like nVidia isn't raking in loads of cash from these overpriced graphics cards...
My problem is... multi-monitor does not work!
So here's where I am at: I can't get multi-monitor to work with Aero enabled on my Laptop. The video card is a GeForce 7800 GO on my Dell E1705. Multi-monitor works with Aero off, it works when I run the second monitor at a low resolution (like 1280x1024) with Aero on, but it doesn't do native video resolution of 1680x1050 - as soon as I try the driver crashes.
Because I live with multiple monitors I've been running with Aero off - frankly I couldn't care less about Aero's transparency and the handful of minor desktop effects (although it certainly does look much nicer on the eyes). But the issue with Aero off is that Microsoft has made video without Aero dreadfully slow. It's like running with an unoptimized VGA driver where everytime you drag a window across the screen you see ghosting and all sorts of other 'effects' (these are not desirable!). It's workable, but it's certainly less than optimal.
In single monitor mode everything actually works Ok and I have no issues but with a second monitor all bets are off. I've tried several monitors too but it appears the issue is the resolution - anything over 1280x1024 on the second display will bomb the driver.
Oddly enough if I run the computer with mirrored display - same image both on the internal and external display that works just fine in full resolution with Aero on. Apparently the issue has something to do with the extended video virtualization of that rather large screen area.
nVidia Driver Circus
I must have tried about 50 different nVidia drivers since I started this journey. But here are a couple of things that might help others who are struggling.
First off if you have any problems with the 1/24/2007 Microsoft nVidia driver that comes down from Windows Update, dump that as soon as possible or better yet don't install it. That driver is positevely evil. It will crash my laptop's nVidia card every five minutes or anytime anything graphics intensive (video, shadows, WPF anything) is accessed. I've verified this with several other people so at least that's not just my setup. Some of the newer nVidia drivers do not have this issue.
To make sure I'm not dealing with a hardware issue I installed Vista on a second hard disk one evening and verified that dual monitor set up works. Vista booted right up in dual monitor mode with the original drivers. As soon as Auto-update installed the 1/24 driver dual monitor stopped working and rolling back did not fix the problem either. If you can avoid installing the 1/24 driver by all means don't! Go straight to a newer driver.
Installing one of the newer drivers from LaptopVideo 2Go fixes the frequent crashes in single monitor mode, but still crashes immediately when switching to multiple monitors. The current driver I'm using is 158.45 - which is by far the most stable driver I've had so far. It doesn't crash ever on single monitor and it works with lower resolutions on the second monitor. When the video driver does crash it also only does so twice in a row before throwing back to the last working video mode which is a big improvement over the previous endless attempt to continue loading the same driver configuration and having to hard power down the machine.
Windows Update - Give me a freaking option to reject updates
One thing that really bugs the heck out of me is that Windows Update will continue to bug me about my nVidia driver and will insist that I install the 1/24 hell driver even though I have a newer driver. Not only that I've can't tell Windows update "No thank you, leave me along, I got it!" Instead everyday I'll have a reminder that I have a video driver update waiting. Thanks for the help... Here's what my Windows Update screen looks like full of crap I don't want:
Is there some way to tell this thing to just move on?
And that brings me to the Windows Reliability tool. I've been sending Microsoft trouble reports from these crashes. For a while the failures were coming hourly and when I cheked the list of unreported items and sent it off last there were a few hundred of these nVidia failures (various kinds apparently) getting sent of. I'm sure MS must be getting tons of these. Yet Microsoft continues to push down a 1/24 driver which is also beta but much worse than more recent drivers from nVidia.
I would expect Microsoft to have an active interest in this as well. I think most people won't think of nVidia as the culprit for the crash but blame it on Vista's instability (and heck maybe that is the problem - for all I know it could be).
I know some of you are going to say - go back to XP and forget about it. Yeah well I wouldn't want to go back to XP either. I think I rather suffer through non-Aero video...