Issue installing Nvidia Drivers

Howdy all, first time poster, long time lurker. I recently chipped in with my girlfriend to buy a spandangly new M11x, ran all the windows updates to get it nicely updated. However, it struggled a bit on the GPU drivers, throwing up the following error:

"The NVIDIA setup program could not find any drivers compatible with your current hardware. Setup will now exit."

Infuriating, so I scoured google and came to this website, and read more or less every thread in the M11x forum, leading me to Nautis' thread where he helped someone out with their driver issue, which was similar to mine. It worked, and I used the updated .inf that he provided - the GPU kicked in after I whitelisted a game, as it hadn't before.

Now, it seems I'm getting some issues. Borderlands runs at under 15 FPS with all the specs to low and minimum resolution, even killing floor struggles during busy scenes. I want to update my drivers to see if this fixes the problem, but obviously cannot as I get the error above. I tried reinstalling windows, but then remembered that the M11x doesn't come with a CD drive :| I copied the files from the disk to a USB stick on a separate computer, but during reinstallation, it threw up a 0x80070570 error, indicating corrupt files.

My specs are as follows;

M11X R2
4 gb RAM
Intel core i5

I'm at the end of my tether - I am totally out of ideas and my girlfriend goes to japan in three weeks for 12 months, I'd really like to be able to play games with her while she's away, but at this rate she'll just have to bust out Minesweeper because the whopping great gaming laptop can't hack anything tougher than a 7-year old UT engine.

Any help or advice anyone can give would be hugely appreciated, thanks guys.

 

I'm not sure I'm clear on the current state of your system. Is the OS installed and running ok? Or is it in some state of re-installation that's hung on that error?

 

Sorry I should have been clearer - I tried reinstalling to see if that fixed the issue, but upon reinstallation I got the error, so it reverted back to my previous install. TL;DR: I'm back at square one.

Thanks for replying so quick!

 

Ok, that's good.

What nvidia driver do you have installed now? Have you tried 258.96? If not then give that a go. It's been one of the more successful releases based on people's feedback here.

http://forum.notebookreview.com/alienware-m11x/499208-nvidia-verde-notebook-driver-258-96-beta-discussion-relating-11xr2.html

EDIT: Be sure to follow the instructions given in the first post of that thread. Specifically the uninstall, reboot to safe mode and running of Driver Sweeper.

 

Reinstall the nvidia driver. I had an issue where I had to reinstall it in order to work. Nvidia just did not kick in no matter what I did. Reinstalling the driver worked.

Make sure to do it properly.

uninstall driver, reboot into safe mode, run driver sweeper-get rid of nvidia display, reboot, install the new driver.

 

Things didn't go down so well. When I reboot I don't get the option to restart in safe mode - I couldn't find it in the bios or the boot options, and stabbing F8 throughout the bootup didn't help either.

Also, for some reason this caused the laptop to not startup correctly, so I've been staring at a System Restore screen for the past hour - not fun!

How do I boot up in Safe Mode?

 

Your going to want to Press F8 Before the Windows 7 Splash Screen.

 

Brilliant, thanks a lot guys! After the embarassing Safe Mode kerfuffle, the rest of the install went off without a hitch. You're the best!

 

Sorry for the double post, but I still seem to have framerate issues. TF2 on 640x480 and with minimum specs still slows down to a crawl - what do you think could be the problem? I have whitelisted the game and checked that the GPU is on using the OptimusViewer, but I have no idea what would cause a relatively low system-intensive game to run slowly :S

 

TF2 should run smoothly on the M11x at native resolution.

I'm assuming that you've successfully installed 258.96. Make sure you've set your power settings to High Performance and that you've turned on multi-core in TF2.

 

I don't know what it is, it's really doing my head in. I've got my power plan to High Performance (never changed it) and all the settings are on minimum on TF2, yet still I have an awful framerate.

Is there any way of telling if I have successfully installed 258.96?

 

/Shameless double post

I thought I'd update this thread incase there is anyone else who suffer the same problems as me - I often browse forum threads and I hate it when people leave problems unsolved.

I have just re-enabled SpeedStep in my Bios and installed EVGA precision and OC'd by about 10 MHz across the board. Firing up TF2 was much more promising, and gave a much improved boost in performance. I'm going to continue to fiddle with the OCing to get as much juice as I can out of this laptop - I really don't think that OCing is required just to run TF2 at an acceptable framerate, but it's just what this cat is gunna have to do

 

I find that with it off performance of the CPU is much less.