Need help with new nvidia drivers 179.48 for boot camp xp32

[dacaliao]

Hello everyone. I'm in dire need of knowledgable assistance here! I've just purchased a beautiful unibody MBP and loving it. Last night I created an 80gb windows xp32 with sp2 partition using boot camp assistant and everything went perfect. Load up xp and installed the apple "install disc" and all drivers were installed.

My intention is to play games on this partition, so I obviously wanted to install the best video drivers. I haven't updated to sp3 yet, but I downloaded the latest nvidia notebook drivers off their website and specifically d/l'd version 179.48 beta, it's an autoexe file. anyways, upon installation it exits, saying it cannot find the hardware to support the drivers.. wtf?! i then tried installing a few laptopvideo2go drives using their method with the modded inf file and was successful installing these files, but xp soon after reverts to the crappy old vga drivers with an error msg.

I'm now trying to update to sp3 and hope this allows the driver to install itself. If anyone has insight or experience with this problem, pls help!

 

[dacaliao]

ok, so I've updated to sp3 and still get the same error msg when trying to install the nvidia beta driver 179.48 from their website. the msg says something to the effect "unable to find hardware compatible with these drivers". Somehow the computer doesn't see the 9600m gt. I've read other threads with the exact same problem but no definitive solution was found

 

[aki]

other people can give u better answers but basically from what i did with my imac....

no you cant use the normal windows nvidia drivers from the websites....u need to use mod versions exactly like at laptopvideo2go

in my case i use the doxdrivers from that site they work very well for me so try them very easy to install

one thing i dont know tho is why your xp goes back to vga drivers??that shouldnt happen i dont think....anyway u can try doxdrivers and see if that works better

ps im on imac with vista32 so if its some xp thing then i dont know

 

[Stridder44]

Sorry I must ask, you did download the 32-bit version, right?


I think it's just me but I feel like a majority of these problem threads are XP SP3 users, which makes me wonder how good SP3 really is.

 

[dacaliao]

Stridder, yes only the 32bit version as I'm using so pro sp3.

Also regarding the dox drivers, are they really better than stock drivers? Can u verify this specific games? If so where do download drivers?

 

[tubbymac]

I remember reading that the first version of the mobile drivers worked on the MBP without modification but I have no MBP to confirm it. The version was the one that came before 179.48 but I can't remember the number. Reports of success are buried in the Macbook Pro forum somewhere in a thread dated around the time of the first mobile driver release.

 

[dacaliao]

Tubbymac, are you referring to drivers from laptopvideo2go or the doxdrivers? I have installed the 179.48 drivers from laptopvideo2go but upon restarting, xp gave me an error msg and reverted back to the crappy screen (ie, no VGA controller driver at all)

 

[tubbymac]

Tubbymac, are you referring to drivers from laptopvideo2go or the doxdrivers? I have installed the 179.48 drivers from laptopvideo2go but upon restarting, xp gave me an error msg and reverted back to the crappy screen (ie, no VGA controller driver at all)

Neither, I'm talking about the "official" drivers you can get from the Nvidia web site -> mobile drivers link. Nvidia has only publically released two versions of this driver. The first version did not work with the Macbook but it did work with the Macbook Pro. I remember this because I tried to install it the week it was released and got the same error you got, "supported hardware not found" on my Macbook Aluminum. The version number was 179.28 or something like that.

The second version of the drivers is the 179.48 one. This one works with my Macbook Aluminum and no longer gives the error. It'd be funny if they broke it on Macbook Pros this time around, heh. There's an easy workaround to it though which people refer to as a "force install" of the drivers. The way it works is easy:

Download the drivers, any version that you want, and run it. When it asks what directory you want to decompress it to, make a note of what the directory name is, or change it to something you'll easily remember. Let it uncompress the stuff and then you'll get the "supported hardware not found" error. Just click OK to close it. The uncompressed directory full of the driver files is all you need. Now go to device manager and find your graphics card, right click on it and choose upgrade driver. From this point on you'll get a bunch of screens with each screen giving you two options. Just keep picking the BOTTOM option every time and when it asks for the directory give it the one where the uncompressed files are. Go through a few of those screens and your drivers will install fine.

 

[aki]

tubbymac sounds like has a working way to do it so try that

for me i did doxdrivers for two reasons

first tho there are many guides to doing force install or modified inis etc etc for some reason i could never get the drivers to install for me.. probably i did it wrong but i tried different times with different instructions so i dont know.... maybe it was problems with the imac GS8800 really being some other card with diff name etc etc

the doxdrivers one worked first try tho yay

second the forums about doxdrivers include mac users and some imac users and the guy who writes doxdrivers is very active helping people with some problem and making changes and stuff.... so because i always had problems before it seemed like a good option for me

for performance... i havent used fraps to compare official and mod drivers or anything but other people have check the laptop2go forums

all i can say is dox works great for me and nothing else did

 

[dacaliao]

i had tried the force install on my previous attempt, but prior to doing that I uninstalled all the drivers. Specifically, I went to add/remove programs in the control panel and removed the "nvidia drivers". I also did this in the device manager under the display adapter "9600m gt". Then I did the forced install and again it gave me problems and since I couldn't get any of the other drivers to work, I had to remove boot camp and redo it all over, which is a pia.

So it sounds like choosing "upgrade driver" with a force install might be an easier way and if it doesn't work hopefully nothing bad happens! I'll let you know. Thanks tubbymac

 

[dacaliao]

Interestingly, I attempted a forced install of the nvidia website drivers 179.48 and the Hardware Update Wizard couldn't continue because "The wizard could not find a better match for your hardware than the software you currently have installed".

I guess the stock drivers are fairly up to date? I find that hard to believe.

 

[tubbymac]

That means you picked the wrong option. A force install does what it's name says - it forces a particular version of the drivers no matter what version you currently have and hence you'll never get that message. In the screens that pop up make sure you always pick the bottom option - on one of the screens it's not obvious because the bottom option is really far down the screen.

 

[dacaliao]

Tubby, I think I must've missed your point but understand now. There are 3 screens that come up after you choose to "update driver" under the display adapter screen.

the first screen asks if you want to connect to the internet to help you find the driver, obviously I click no.
the second screen asks if you want to install the software automatically (recommended) or install manually, I choose manually.
the third screen has 2 basic options, search for the best driver in these locations, and you can choose where it should look. The the other option on the bottom says "don't search, I will choose the driver to install".

My last attempt i didn't do the "don't search, I will choose the driver to install", I just picked the folder where it was located. I'll definitely give this a try this weekend and see what happens. Thanks!

 

[tubbymac]

My last attempt i didn't do the "don't search, I will choose the driver to install", I just picked the folder where it was located. I'll definitely give this a try this weekend and see what happens. Thanks!

Yeap that's an easy mistake to make. The first few times I tried a force install I goofed up on that 3rd screen too since it was so far down the screen you barely notice it

 

[aki]

sounds like OP has sorted his problem but for anyone who is interested to answer an earlier question... dox drivers are posted here

http://www.laptopvideo2go.com/forum/index.php?showforum=122

(recommended one right now is probably 181.22.1)

why are they better??well the maker says they

• mod infs to run on all cards mobile and desktop
• quality and performance tweaks mainly for gaming
• removed some bloat
• packaged installer

works very well for me....especially the installer system means i dont have "incompatible with your hardware" etc etc problems

 

[Markov]

The DOX drivers caused my screen to never wake up after sleep. It messed with my power management settings and grayed them all out. They are great for gaming tweaks, but did a few annoying things too.

 

[aki]

The DOX drivers caused my screen to never wake up after sleep. It messed with my power management settings and grayed them all out. They are great for gaming tweaks, but did a few annoying things too.

yes its recognized there are some laptop things which dont work properly and people workaround or just ignore coz they like the optomized drivers

i know dox has worked to fix some of these things with sleep and hibernation but i use desktop so i dont really follow those threads

 

[dacaliao]

I actually haven't attempted an install of any video driver other than what comes as a boot camp update. I'm a little scared to mess up my partition again and have to start all over. I have benched my MBP though and am currently running a few older games, notably bioshock and mass effect. Bioshock runs playably (30-40 fps) at native res with all effects turned high, which shocked me. So i've decided not to update the drivers until I play a newer game that requires such action hehe. I also bought left4dead at it's discounted price last weekend so I'll give that a go once I finish bioshock and see what the frames are like in versus mode.

 

[aki]

i know how u feel about not trashing everything i was the same so i used winclone backup just incase hehe

the bootcamp drivers are old but sure they work......better than vga mode or whatever that thing is

UPDATE: just as an fyi for anyone who wants to know - i did do very inaccurate and quick compare with fraps from the bootcamp orginal drivers and dox version 180-something, in fallout3, and saw around 5 fps better performance on my imac 3.06 8800gs