Most likly Your system probaly doesn't do a clear shutdown all recent settings would 'not have happend'. Try to change the windows theme and reboot - if it is reset, you progably have either a fault in your windows system(causing a crash while shutting down) or some directory access rights are fucked up.

Okay I'll try if that helps. I just installed win7 without any problems, So it would be odd if it was broken already. all other drivers stay just fine after reboots.

Could be worse, could have my 4 year old laptop..

Fun stuff. This is actually probably nothing to do with Windows if it's doing it on a clean install. It's possible your motherboard is losing its hardware database cache and rebuilding it every bootup, making windows think there is new hardware installed. Granted, it should automatically install the new hardware but you never know. How old is your motherboard? Have you tried disconnecting the power, pulling out the CMOS battery for 15 seconds, putting it back in, and seeing if it makes a difference?

There are also scattered indicators that a specific Windows x64 update will cause this as well. Are you currently running SP1 on Windows 7? If not, try installing SP1. If so, we can continue troubleshooting.

*Swishes his tails, happy to help another 3d animator*

Hmmh some good ideas. :) I'm installing everything in windows update now. If it doesn't help gotta open up the case.

It's 3-4 year old I don't remember exactly.

Yup, well if you want some help with it, I do this stuff for a living (Enterprise administrator, if there's a problem that exists in any version of windows, odds are I've seen it).

Well, I have now installed all important and not so important updates that windows update could find, SP1 included. Same thing still. Although on the device manager it now says that "Device was stopped because it reported an error (code 43)" (translated myself dunno if it's like that in english. :P) Earlier it was just missing drivers iirc.

Also, when I try to open nvidia control panel it says something like "nvidia display settings are not availble. The screen in use is not the one connected to Nvidia videocard" However both screens are connected to the same card just as before. and yeah I've tried to use only one screen. both work but that won't help with the problem. :S

Before I installed win7, Vista lost the driver once when I was taking backups of my stuff. Before that it worked fine enough although a bit slowly. :)

If the battery is empty could it cause this kind of stuff? and why doesn't it effect any other devices?

Yup it could, or if it is just nvidia drivers doing it it could be a fault in the card or insuffecient power to it. Try the cmos batter. Do any other devices do this, or is it only the card?

Well, the power has been enough for it for 3-4 years. I don't think it suddenly needs more. :) Only thing that does this is this card. All other devices work just fine. I moved the computer to my place from my parent's house but there didn't happen anything special which could've broken the card. But I suppose it's possible that it just decided to die now. Although why would it work fine without the drivers if there was something wrong in it? I actually managed to switch to full hd resolution and it looks as good as always. So it would be hard to imagine that broken card could do it. :S Eh, Dunno.

Hmm, well if it's in 3d emulator mode instead of true 3d, it won't kick in some of the advanced driver-driven functions of the card... My money's on it either being a dead CMOS battery, or possible damage to the card. You should clean the dust out of it every year or so, otherwise it builds up and can cause thermal damage. Visually inspect the card, blow out any dust, and reseat it and the power. Also try changing the CMOS battery. Depending on your motherboard, it /should/ look like a watch battery. If you send me photos I can tell ya exactly what to look for. :)

I cleaned dust off and there wasn't really too much of it. The card looks like that: http://www.firingsquad.com/hardware...../images/01.jpg So it's a bit hard to tell if there's anything broken inside without taking it apart which I don't prefer to do. I'll change the battery asap. Gotta go buy one first though. Oh and I suppose it's worth mentioning that after the first time I installed those drivers the card worked just fine 3d stereo stuff included. After second reboot it hasn't done anything other that just 2d stuff. So I don't think the card is broken unless it just died on that reboot, which I think it a bit unlikely.

Yup. Well two things - I know the Stereoscopic stuff doesn't work right, but that's not the 3d I was talking about (I don't even install the Stereoscopic drivers, TBH). When I'm referring to 3d, I mean anything DirectX or OpenGL Driven. 2d is stuff that isn't driven by those drivers.

As for the card, that outer plastic shell can be safely unscrewed to give you access into the fans to pull the dust out, without having to unscrew any other components, just FYI. I recommend doing it at least once a year to clean things out - the shell comes off and goes back on really easily, but I understand if you're hesitant to mess with it. :)

But yeah my advice right now is to replace the CMOS battery (It's your standard coin cell watch battery), reseat the card (pull it out and put it back in again), and reconfigure your BIOS settings as they'll have been lost once you removed the CMOS battery.

Then, try installing the latest NVIDIA drivers. I recommend skipping the stereoscopic drivers (Choose to customize your installation and deselect those drivers) unless you actually have a 3d monitor capable of stereoscopic output and use it. Also, try lowering your UAC settings in Windows by hitting the Start key and typing UAC - it should come up with a option saying to "Change UAC Settings". Drop it down to "never notify me" and you will start running almost everything as true administrator.

Yeah I know what you meant. :) But when I first installed it it did run 3d apps and 3d stereo worked (Yeah I use it every now and then) Until the second reboot. I did take the card out but I didn't bother to open it since there wasn't really any dust in it. I used compressed air can to clean the little dust there was. I blew it in the airholes too but I don't think dust is causing the problem. I updated bios, changed the battery and reconfigured the settings after that. Still, same thing kept happening. Then I re-installed windows again and now it froze on the first boot. (on the animated windows logo thingy) I hit reset and it loaded up and surprisingly had once again lost the drivers I installed. I just don't understand why UAC would do this kind of stuff. It never causes any problems on my laptop. :/

I read somewhere that one m$ .net framework update causes freezing on startup. I don't think it would cause it to clean installation of windows though. Maybe the card is broken after all. :S

*nod*

Well let's try something else, as the base drivers for 7 may be causing issues. First off, go to Start and type Services.msc. Find "Desktop Window Manager" - this is the Aero eye candy effects in Windows. Double click it, and set it to Disabled, then stop the service.

Next, download the latest Nvidia driver for your card, save it to your C:\ drive.

Download and run CCCleaner and http://www.guru3d.com/category/driversweeper/

Have Driversweeper get rid of ALL the graphics drivers for ATI or Nvidia. Even if you're a clean install. Have CCCleaner get rid of all temp files and clean up the registry.

Reboot into safe mode, and right click, run the driver installer as Administrator.

Gotta try that tomorrow.

Well, it works now. I didn't do anything else to it than start it this morning. So far everything has worked just fine. Games work and everything else too and I've rebooted it many times without any problems. :S This was a strange problem. I hope it doesn't lose those drivers again anytime soon. :) Thanks for all the help. :) Gotta make those windows recovery things (dunno what they're in english) often in case something I install breaks it down again.

Bah nevermind. I turned off the computer win started installing 75 updates and when I restarted it again everything was messed up. Oh and I did rollback to state where everything worked, but that didn't help at all. It seems that rollback doesn't remove win updates. Installing vista now.

First boot on vista and drivers are gone.

Yeah it sounds like a graphics hardware failure.

Do me a favor, for testing purposes. Does your mobo have onboard video? If so, pull out the card completely, reinstall 7, and use the onboard graphics. See if you have the same issues with the card out of the equation.

Nope it doesn't have onboard video now that I checked it. :/ It's just strange how the card works perfectly when the drivers stay. But maybe there's something small wrong with it. dunno, :S

Well, usually if it's doing that it indicates a short in the card - either from heat buildup, conductive material on the card, or power fault. Is it under warranty?

Nah it's 3-4 years old, so no warranty. Temperature was just fine when I checked. The card is so well cased that I don't think I could've dropped anything in it either. I guess I'll have to open it up and see if there's something wrong in there, but I still think this is some sort of driver / windows update issue. But I may be wrong of course. :P

Well without having it in front of me to look, realistically the only way it will indicate that you have a problem with the device, causing a load/unload of the driver, is either a bad driver; which you've tried multiple versions of to no improvement; or a hardware fault in the card itself.

If you like, I can e-mail you a logmein MSI to run that will let me work with you and control your computer to help troubleshoot the issues in real time later today, but I really do suspect it's a hardware problem. Check your event viewer and see if it has any errors under system - paste them here. :)

Also, when you're booting up, do you see your bios settings? It's possible that your CMOS (due to dead battery) is being lost and it's switching to the on-board video. :)

This is why I run Linux...

Time at an internet cafe to find and download Ubuntu... $5
DVD R/W disc to burn the .iso file onto.... $0.12
Knowing that your OS is stable...... priceless.

There are some operating systems you don't have to buy
For everyone else, there's Microsoft.

Sorry to burst your bubble, but when googling around for solutions I found threads where people had similar problems in linux.

I've had more problems in linux than I've ever had in Windows or OS X. Even had more problems in Linux than when I was on Vista 64bit pre-service pack 1. Plus, the only 3D application out there that works properly on linux is Blender which I'm not the biggest fan of.

As for your computer issue, It might be drivers having a problem. I just recently went through this with my AMD card where the drivers wouldent install, but then there was a slightly newer driver and it worked beautifully, maybe try using a slightly older driver?

Hmmh well, I've tried various drivers. Some old ones caused BSOD on startup and a bit newer disappear just like the newest one. I'll try more different drivers if some version would work.

I'm running Nvidia drivers on Ubuntu 11.04 with zero problems...

I'm running nvidia drivers on my laptop Win7 with zero problems, but that doesn't help in this situation either.

My Nvidia drivers wont even activate under Ubuntu and Mint. Not like a Nvidia 9800GT is an uncommon card either.

I'm using that card myself

System --> Administration --> Additional Drivers to activate your Nvidia driver. Restart. Done.

It's really that simple. No need to use Mint or anything.

No that doesn't work. The driver activates but at the propritary drivers screen is just states "this driver is activated but not currently in use" and because of that, I think it's the reason why Compiz fusion refuses to work as well.

But that's far off from my point. I was stating that all OS have issues, and if you think that Linux (or Ubuntu specifically) doesn't have any issues, well then I think you're wearing some blinders.

Meh, it always says 'is activated but not currently in use' unless you are actively using something that requires it. I had to deliberately turn OFF Compiz Fusion because I cannot stand the new Unity crap that 11.04 introduced. Fortunately, unlike windows, there's a way to turn off the shiny sparkly UI that eats up resources.

Sure, every OS has issues. Unlike Windows, however, Linux actually gives a crap about fixing them. And doesn't charge you another $500 whenever they decide on a new version.

Whatever lol, discussion sort of ends here as it's pretty clear that you're just a fan boy. haha.

have fun with your ubuntu, and btw... to turn off Aero you choose "windows classic, or windows basic" mode. :3

Goodbye.

Have you tried installing the driver using the "run as administrator" option when you rightclick the exe?

Hmm nope, but I am adminstrator.

Yeah me too.. but programs will still be run with limited access to system resources. With many installations win7 will actually tell you a few minutes after the install that the program may not have installed correctly. Its some weird policy crap, annoyed the heck out of me the first days.

Well, I did try to install them like you suggested, but it doesn't seem to help. However on the device manager thing it not says that there seems to be some sort of problem with the device instead of missing drivers. Dunno when it changed to show that error though. (code 43)

the most probable cause is, Windows 7 is going "backwards", aka restoring a older backup over and over.

so either 1.- you have a virus 2.- the drivers are not compatible and fucking something up.. causing windows 7 autorstore to kick in.

No viruses. Just installed win 7 and installed firewall & antivirus after that. Drivers are compatible at least according to Nvidia's automatic driver selection tool. And if it was autorestore it would probably mention something about it and not just stealth remove driver.

nvidia automatic driver selection tool?

I hope the "automatic" thing isnt windows update.. windows update always fucks up 3rd party drivers..

anyway if you keep trying that, just download the latest forceware and run it in administrator mode..
also some firewalls (like comodo) can block changes to the internal windows 7 core files, preventing some drivers or software to install correctly.
just saying..

Nope it's the thing on Nvidia's site. I'm too lazy to select my OS graphics card and all that stuff manually. :P I use mcafee and it hasn't caused any problems on my laptop which is also running win 7. I suppose I could try to install the driver once more with mcafee disabled. dunno if it'll help though,

well, just to say that Mcafee removed TMPGenc Xpress installer out from the original site because of a "troyan" (according to mcafee, neither norton neither virus total detected it..)
I have to say MCafee and Norton are the worst tier in antivirus.

Well I got it with my laptop and I don't have anything negative to say about it. Nice and simple, works and doesn't ask stupid questions all the time. That doesn't apply to Norton, F-secure or bunch of some free softwares which I've tried though. Norton & F-secure both eventually messed up my computer so badly that it had to be reformated. That's not exactly what I expect from my antivirus software :X

yeah, thats one of the biggest complains of norton.. it hooks so hard in windows.. once you uininstall, it autodestroys itself, leaving your system fucked up as well..
anyway I got Mcafee on my dell too, and first thing I did once I noticed it was deleting legit application, was uninstall and use COMODO's

Well, yeah it has deleted one file which I think was legit but can't say for sure since I downloaded it from somewhere. :) iirc I had comodo on my old laptop and it kep asking stupid questions all the time.

Anyway, tried to install drivers without mcafee on and it didn't help. :/

dang that sucks, sorry I wasnt help.. anyway perhaps try an older driver, it might help :>

I think something may actually be up with the latest Nvidia drivers. Granted, I'm running XP, but even so, whenever I do a reboot it's constantly forgetting where I put windows at on my secondary monitor and keeps defaulting them to the primary. I think something on their end may be screwy.

Depending on your hardware, you may want to give OmegaDrivers (3rd party programmers) a shot. I've used them in the past when I've had issues with a driver, and their version generally resolves it. The only caveat with them is support for the newer cards doesn't exist yet. Ya can find them at:
http://www.omegadrivers.net/index.php

Hmmh yeah dunno. Those drivers might be worth testing. Thanks. :)

Do you have a second video card? perhaps on motherboard?
i dont know if its a laptop or not but if you do try removing the card and rebooting with the other video card, then shut down and re inseart the corect card and try again. Sometimes this fools the operating system to co operating

also if you have a secondary slot the vid card can fit in move it to that one and try reinstalling

last thing i can think of is to purge the registry of all nvida refrences and also kill the file, reboot, and then try again..

hope that helps.

My card is "2 in 1" geforce 9800 GX2 or something like that. One massive thing that takes 2 pci express slots. Iirc I have onboard graphics card, but it's disabled in bios. I suppose I could try to use it but I'll try all other ways first. I tried to delete all drivers already, but might be worth trying again with better tools.

well it would only be temporary, and it would re enable when you removed the card. its his long enough for windows to forget your video card exists.

You're running into the UAC issue where the drivers are being installed "temporarily" and are cleared from the system on reboot.

Well, dunno. I can't change where it installs the drivers. And why it's just nvidia drivers? :o

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p85xwZ_OLX0
Personally, i'm not really sure, It just seems they are being removed or not installed. Therefore, check its not a temp install, files are going to the proper directory. otherwise, try anti-virus isnt removing it, or more likely windows. Windows UAC made me rage, turned it off, now I get it complaining all the time. Rage.

I can't change the folder where drivers are installed. Antivirus doesn't delete them. It always says when it deletes something. I haven't had any problems with UAC on my laptop.

Windows UAC is a bad joke compared to Linux UAC and that's no wonder because M$ is just learning the UAC things. Linux has always had UAC.

I fucking love my computer. I swear its a telepathic genius. Downloading stuff, 0kb/s till a minute before I walk in the room. And last night, it managed to create its own restore point (Never been done before), before starting this morning with errors & vista licencing bullshit, then safe mode, restore, back to normal :D
Except steam is down. D:

If I may ask, What animation were you planning to release? BTW I hope your computer gets fixed soon lol

M rat & M Gnoll

Have you tried installing the drivers in safe mode? I had this very problem with my Clevo X8100. I just installed the drivers in safe mode and POOF! They stayed around, that was about six months ago and have not had the same problem repeat so I am seriously guessing it is the specific driver.

Yup just tried that, but they disappeared once again. :/

Is your motherboard an nVidia chipset, an Intel chipset or other?

Had Windows 7 been installed before, or is this the first time it has been installed on your computer? Is it 64-bit Windows or 32-bit Windows?

How much RAM does the computer have? How much does Windows report? Look under Control Panel -> System to see the actual RAM use.

Are any other devices missing or failing in device manager?

MB is Asus P5K P35 with intel chipset. Earlier it had dual boot setup vista(64)/xp now only win7 (64bit) 4.00GB and it's all useable. No problems with memory.

There's few useless things which don't have drivers like gameport on soundcard. Actually both the sound card & gameport are disabled. I use onboard sound card.

I tried to detach the graphics card and see if it was dusty, but it wasn't. I Updated bios and changed the battery on MB. Nothing has helped so far. This is gettings rather annoying. :/

It seems unlikely that the driver is being 'lost,' and is more likely that the card itself is not working correctly. It is possible that the card is damaged. Also, make sure you have the right driver, hehe.

Possibilities:

Try enabling/disabling the "Memory Remap" function in the BIOS. See if one or the other setting makes a difference. There is a possibility that the system won't boot after switching this. If this happens, just revert the setting.

Make sure "Peg Port Control" is set to 'auto' and that "Peg force 1x" is set to 'disabled'.

Try enabling/disabling the "Plug and Play OS" setting. Note that this may cause Windows to re-detect much of the hardware. There is a slight, but very unlikely possibility, that some hardware settings in windows may be lost (like resolution settings, sound card volume settings).

Try disabling the "ACPI APIC support".

In the APM menu, disable the "Wake by PCI-e" setting.

Disable other hardware devices in the BIOS, like the sound card, network card, the J-Micron IDE controller, serial port, parallel port.. the idea is to free io and irq resources to see if there is a conflict or lack.

Unplug other devices that are possible to unplug, like CD-ROMS, other hard drives.

Does anything work?

Gotta try it tomorrow.

Also, dumb question, in which manner have you tried installing the drivers?

There's generally three methods to the madness:

1) needing to boot the computer to the desktop, then running the install.
2) windows informing you that you need to install drivers for a new device, and prompting you for the driver location.
3) running the hardware wizard to search for new hardware, then following the prompts.

Also, there very well may be a driver set for the device already installed, which windows is declaring the official and newer version in which case it won't install older drivers for the device. And that even if the windows drivers are generic drivers.

Thought of a few more things:

I didn't think of one thing. Just to make sure... I must ask... the card i plugged into the blue PCI-e slot, correct?

Is this a branded computer or custom-built? If branded, try the drivers from thier driver-download site instead of the driver from nvidia.

If Windows Update offers a video driver in the optional update section, try it. If it works, this is likely a software problem.

Try installing the motherboard chipset drivers first, then installing the video drivers:
[ http://downloadcenter.intel.com/Sea.....p;LineId=127&FamilyId=40 ]

Select Windows 7 64-bit, then download the INF update utility (but not the ZIP version). This shouldn't matter, but these are all guesses anyway, hehe..

It's custom built. and the card is in blue slot and I've installed chipset drivers. Anyway. Yesterday I installed windows again and it hang up on the first reboot and lost the drivers every time I got it to load windows properly. Now after it was turned off during night and I opened it again this morning everything works just fine now. O_O Drivers haven't disappeared in many reboots I've done and games work etc. Damn this was a strange problem. I just hope it doesn't lose the drivers again anytime soon. :) Thanks for help.

Bah nevermind. I turned off the computer win started installing 75 updates and when I restarted it again everything was messed up. Oh and I did rollback to state where everything worked, but that didn't help at all. It seems that rollback doesn't remove win updates. Installed vista, and drivers disappeared on first boot.

Have you tried unplugging other devices like CD-Roms and extra hard drives? This includes power.. both data and power cables.

This sounds suspiciously like a failed video card, power supply, or motherboard. Take out the card and blow out the PCI-e slot.. maybe it is dusty.

Double post.. is the fan running on the video card while the computer is on? Is it slow?

Also, do you have the motherboard bus frequency or the PCI-e frequency set manually in the BIOS, or are all the frequencies set to 'auto' ?

The temperatures of the card are just fine and fan is running. I haven't removed any parts since this is the configuration that has worked for 3-4 years until recently. I already removed the card and checked if it / PCI-e were dusty, but they weren't really. All that stuff in BIOS is on auto since I don't really know much about those. That's how they've been all the time.

My vote is on failing power supply or failing video card.

I think the correct next steps are to being testing hardware if possible.

Hmm I just had an idea, where are you getting the drivers for your motherboard chipset etc from? when I bought my components for my main desktop, Windows Vista was the current OS. When I moved to Windows 7 I installed off the driver CD that came with the motherboard and I had lots of bluescreen issues and windows would hang on startup etc.

I know this is going to be a huge pain in the arse, but if you can maybe try re-installing Windows 7 again, but make sure you get the drivers for your motherboard, chipset, sound, gpu etc all from the vendors website. www.gigabyte.com for example. What I would do is install those, then go into Windows Update and have it update those 72 or so updates that are "important" (ignore optional ones especially for your GPU) I know that's a huge amount of work, but it's sort of the last resort thing I can think of other than maybe in the nvidia control panel make sure "sli" is enabled between your two gpu cores?

I really hope you can figure it out.

I'm getting them from asus site which is the manufacturer of the MB. (card drivers I dl from nvidia like the last few years. :) ) I don't even know where my driver cd is. :P sli was enabled in drivers when I could get into nvidia control panel. Well, I'll install win7 once again when I have time. I'll see if what you suggested would help.

Alrighty man, I wish you the best of luck, maybe what needs to be done is update, then install the video drivers. might be that there is something important missing on initial install to get the Nvidia drivers working.

I've read everything over and what it honestly sounds like is the video ram on the card isn't hot starting properly (which explains why it runs fine sometimes when it's starting from room temperature) unfortunately though this means that the card most likely needs to be replaced, although you may be able to replace the thermal compound to make it work right again (I'd need exact brand/model of the card to see if it was possible), most card makers use cheap thermal tape for the contacts which after years of abuse can dry and crumble, sometimes though the ram modules sit close enough to the sink to use actual paste (the stuff used to attach heatsinks to your cpu on your motherboard and the gpu itself on the card) this will keep the temps lower and might let you squeeze a little more life out of the poor thing. but if it is heat failures then it's only a matter of time before it dies all together. replacing all that yourself won't cost much and just takes a bit of time and a steady hand.

It's Nvidia geforce 9800 GX2 by Asus. http://www.techspot.com/review/91-a.....orce-9800-gx2/ that one. I moved the computer to my place so maybe it caused something even though I didn't really remember bumping it to anything or anything like that. :S

It never did this stuff before

well... problems like that are gradual, I actually had the same thing happen on a stick of desktop ram in my main computer, it'll start up fine from room temperature, but it refuses to work hot, best way to see if that's the problem is to see if it starts more reliably when it has plenty of time to cool before starting again, maybe blow it off with compressed air to make sure it gets down to temperature first.

went and looked up the reference for the card... it's a double layered dual gpu beast. I take back what I said about it being a simple job to replace the thermal compounds, you need to take it to a professional and have them diagnose it, the way it's assembled it is rather fragile, prone to being twisted (it looks like an oreo made out of pcb with a heatsink filling XP ) I really don;t know what to say, the temperatures it was "designed to withstand" are a bit high for it to be a long lasting card so I'm gonna put my money on it being some form of early stage heat failure. as stated before though, it could be a power supply, but that would also be indicated by cpu failures and unexpected crashes, possibly without any kind of blue screen or warning. if it is early stage heat failure it can kind of be put on "life support" by liquid cooling it, but you'd be looking at about a $200-$300 loop (still less than the card) and that should hold it for a good couple years or so just due to how well liquid cooling works on video equipment (brought my amd HD6950 from 110C full load to 40C ) but that would also have to be done professionally... I dunno, just throwing out options.