The nvidia graphics driver does not install. NVIDIA driver won't install

Situations where it is impossible to install a driver on a video card are very common. Such problems always require an immediate solution, since without a driver, instead of a video card, we just have a few very expensive pieces of hardware.

There are many reasons why software refuses to install. Let's look at the main ones.


NVIDIA

“Green” software, despite its ease of use (“install and use”), can be quite sensitive to various system factors, such as errors, software conflicts, incorrect installation or uninstallation of previous editions or additional software.

AMD

The main problem when installing drivers from the “red” ones is the presence of old software. It is for this reason that AMD software may refuse to install on the system. The solution is simple: before installing new software, you need to completely remove the old one. The easiest way to do this is using the official AMD Clean Uninstall program.


Please note that this action will completely remove AMD components from the system, that is, not only the display program, but also other software. If you use a platform from Intel, then this method is suitable for you. If your system is based on AMD, then it is better to use another program called Display Driver Uninstaller. You can read how to use this software in.

Intel

Problems with installing drivers on integrated graphics from Intel are quite rare and are mostly complex in nature, that is, they are a consequence of incorrect installation of other software, in particular for the chipset. This most often occurs during software updates on laptops, which we will discuss below.

Laptops

In this section we will talk about the procedure for installing drivers on a laptop, since this is where the “root of evil” lies. The main mistake when solving problems with laptop software is “sorting through”, that is, trying to install different software if “it doesn’t work.” This is exactly the kind of advice you can get on some forums: “did you install this one?”, “try this one again.” The result of such actions in most cases is a loss of time and a blue screen of death.

Let's look at a special case with a Lenovo laptop, which has an AMD video card and an integrated Intel graphics core.

As mentioned above, it is necessary to follow the order of software installation.

  1. First of all, install the driver for the motherboard chipset (chipset).
  2. Then we install the software for the integrated Intel graphics.
  3. The driver for the discrete video card is installed last.

So let's get started.

  1. Go to the official Lenovo website, find the link "Drivers" on the menu "Support and Warranty".

  2. On the next page, enter the model of our laptop and click ENTER.

  3. Next you need to follow the link "Drivers and Software".

  4. Scroll down the page and find the block with the name "Chipset". Open the list and find the driver for our operating system.

  5. Click on the eye icon next to the software name, and then click on the link "Download".

  6. In the same way, download the software for the integrated Intel video core. It is located in the block "Display and video cards".

  7. Now we install the driver for the chipset in turn, and then for the integrated graphics core. After each installation, a reboot is required.
  8. The final step is to install the software for the discrete video card. Here you can already use software downloaded manually from the official AMD or NVIDIA website.

Windows 10

The desire of Microsoft developers to automate everything and everyone often leads to some inconvenience. For example, the “ten” provides for updating video card drivers through the standard Windows Update. Attempts to install software manually may lead to errors, including the impossibility of installation. Since a driver is a set of system files, the OS thus “protects” us from software that is incorrect from its point of view.

There is only one way out: manually check for updates and install the driver.

As you can see, there is nothing wrong with installing drivers, the main thing is to follow simple rules and systematize the actions.

Many users often encounter many problems when installing drivers for a video card. One of them is the inability to install the driver. This problem is quite common, but also quickly solvable.

Today we will look in detail at how to solve the problem of the inability to install a driver for an NVIDIA video card on Windows 7.

Manifestation of the problem

If you see a window like this, which warns that it is impossible to continue installing the NVIDIA driver, then this material will help you. So let's get started.


How to find out the video card ID

Unpacking the driver

The next action that needs to be taken is to look at where we unpacked the NVIDIA driver, which we should have downloaded at this point. Let's run it and look - default directory: disk C, folder NVIDIA Display Driver and so on. Find this folder on the disk "C", we get to the main driver directory, but we need to go to the folder "Display Driver". Here we need a file nvamn with extension inf .


In this case, the extension is visible, but sometimes the extension is not displayed - depending on the settings "Files and folders". But this is not really that important.

Editing the nvamn file


Let's sum it up


As was said at the beginning of the article, there are a great many problems with installing drivers on a video card, but we examined and solved the most common one, related to the inability to identify the video card, in this guide. The solution turned out to be quite simple, but very effective.

Video cards today are perhaps the most powerful and high-tech devices in a modern desktop computer or advanced laptop. With its help, dynamic scenes in games are processed graphically, physical effects are created, and signals, pictures, and sound are output on an HD panel. There is also their indirect function: with their help, hackers brute force combinations and crack the most complex passwords.

The video card has become almost a self-sufficient device, a device “in itself”. On board any video card there is: a processor, RAM, additional interfaces and a bus for communication with the computer’s motherboard.

Often, a video adapter consumes up to 80% of a computer's total energy consumption, especially when processing complex graphics and physics. It is for such video cards that gamers and geeks buy powerful power supplies, for which getting the car starter to work is almost a piece of cake.

And in order for such a “monster” to function correctly and to its full potential, it must have the correct software instructions. Sometimes errors and failures happen - for some reason The video card driver is not installed, or it installs, but works with errors. Let's name the main ones reasons why drivers are not installed on a video card.


The most common breakdowns (reasons) due to which drivers for a video card may not be installed

  1. The first and most likely reason: the video adapter has failed. The solution to the problem is radical: the video card will have to be replaced or repaired.
  2. The video adapter overheats due to insufficient cooling system. The cooling system cooler may be clogged with dust and does not rotate; the thermal paste has dried out. Solution: repair the cooling system. In the early stages - preventive cleaning of dust from the video card cooling system, replacing thermal paste on the chip. For laptops: disassembling, cleaning the laptop from dust and replacing thermal pads.
  3. The driver for a specific video card is not selected correctly; wrong version, wrong Windows bit depth. Output: carefully check the data on the video card, download the required driver from the manufacturer’s website - it’s best. by device ID using third-party programs and services. This method of installing drivers is not recommended, especially for laptops with rare video chips and with a hybrid video accelerator (Intel-Nvidia).
  4. The previous video card driver was not removed correctly: there are tails left in the registry, the uninstaller program for the previous driver is damaged. You must remove all previous versions of the driver using special software and restart the computer. After this, install the latest available driver from the video processor manufacturer's repository.
  5. There is malware, viruses, Trojans and other garbage on your computer (laptop). What to do: either order a service, or download a special utility for it and do it yourself.
  6. The Microsoft Windows operating system is unstable: registry errors, disruption of stable system operation, blue screens, freezes. Recommended.

Discrete GeForce graphics card for laptop

It is very important to know how to correctly install a new driver for Nvidia video cards, because freezes, brakes, dead pixels, missing or missing textures in games - all these problems can be the result of outdated drivers or their absence at all. Moreover, incorrect installation of NVidia driver can also lead to problems.

Where to download and how to install the driver correctlyNVidia

You need to download drivers for NVidia video cards only from the company's official website. Otherwise, you can expose your PC to danger, and it makes no sense to download GeForce drivers from third-party resources, because everything you need can be found on the manufacturer’s official page.

There are two options for installing a graphics driver on an NVidia GeForce video card. We will tell you in detail about each of them.

How to install the driverNVidia manually

Manually installing a driver for an NVidia GeForce video card is ideal for those who are not a fan of installing programs that load the computer's RAM and constantly work in the background, which certainly applies to NVidia GeForce Experience, a special utility that automatically searches for and installs drivers.

To properly download and then install the Nvidia driver, follow the instructions below (we recommend that you first read the two tips below):

  • You will see a page with a form for manually filling out information about your video card. Select your product type, graphics card series, graphics card family, your operating system and language, then click the green Search button on the right.
  • Once the driver for your NVidia graphics card has been successfully found, you will be presented with more detailed information about it and a “Download Now” button. Click it and download the driver to your PC.
  • After downloading the driver, you must unpack it. Select the folder where you want to extract the files and click OK.
  • Then, once the unpacking is complete, the GeForce driver installation process will automatically begin. Accept the terms of the license agreement by clicking "OK" and follow the instructions.

Tip 1: before unpacking and installing a new video card driver NVidia , it is recommended to remove the old one. To do this, go through the “Start” menu to “Programs and Features” (or “Add or Remove Programs”, depending on the OS version) and find the application “ NVidia GPU xxx.xx" (instead of xxx.xx there will be the version number of your driver). Then click “Remove/Change”, confirm the action and wait for uninstallation.

Tip 2: before proceeding with the instructions on how to install the driver NVidia , we recommend also disabling your antivirus. There are many examples when antivirus software deleted some files without warning or notification or blocked driver installation NVidia .

How to install the driverGeForce by usingNVidia GeForce Experience

Installing NVidia drivers using the special NVidia GeForce Experience program is much easier and faster than manually. Moreover, the program itself has many useful functions, especially for gamers - from optimizing game settings to the ability to record in-game video and automatically extend laptop battery life during games. However, some users don't like that it puts a lot of stress on the system while running in the background. The choice, in any case, is yours. We would recommend using the utility.

So, to answer the question of how to correctly install the GeForce driver using the program, do the following:

  • Open the official NVidia website
  • Select the “Drivers” menu at the top and click on “GeForce Experience”
  • You will see a page describing the benefits of this program and a large green “Download Now” button. Click it and wait for the download to complete.
  • After downloading GeForce Experience, open the installation file and install the program on your PC, following the simple instructions.
  • When the program is installed, go into it, go to the “Drivers” tab and click “Check for updates” in the upper right corner of the utility.
  • If your driver is out of date, you will be notified that an update is available. Click on it and the program will automatically install the latest GeForce NVidia driver.

Attention: during driver installation the computer will restart - do not be alarmed, this is normal. You don’t need to perform any actions yourself; you also don’t need to restart the PC - this will result in a failure in installing the driver. NVidia . In addition, be sure to disable the antivirus before installation - often, during auto-installation, antivirus software blacklists the program, blocking the connection to the Internet, which entails an error in installing drivers.

Not long ago I became the owner of a very good Russian-made gaming laptop - .

Despite the fact that the laptop's hard drive contained complete sets of drivers for three operating systems, in fact all the drivers turned out to be very old. And, if updating the driver for the chipset was not difficult (you download a single package from the Intel website), then with the driver for the video you had to suffer quite a lot.

Let me remind you that the laptop has an Nvidia GeForce 8600M GS video card. Combined with a Core 2 Duo T8300 processor running at 2.4 GHz, this is a pretty good gaming combination. But the video driver was initially installed with version 156.76 dated 10/24/2007. As you can imagine, it is quite old. For example, when installing the game Bioshock, the installer complained about the old video card drivers and immediately suggested that we go download new ones.

So, where else can you get drivers if not on the manufacturer’s website, you say. That's what I thought too. I went to the Nvidia website, selected the OS, the family of video cards (GeForce 8M series (notebook)) and downloaded a 110 megabyte package. I start the installation and receive a message that goes something like this: “The NVIDIA installer did not find any drivers compatible with the installed hardware. The installer stops working."

I'm at a loss. I check again whether I downloaded it, open the driver configuration files (maybe my video card is not supported?) - but I understand that everything should be fine. However, the driver installation fails.

The first thing I decided to do was contact the company’s technical support. On the laptop manufacturer’s website, it is written very beautifully about providing assistance to everyone, a toll-free phone number for calls is given, and a hotline email. I wrote a letter in which I asked for new compatible drivers for the video card. And here DEPO’s technical support showed its worst side. Having asked for the serial number of the laptop (it’s not clear why), the support worker fell silent. After waiting more than a day (suddenly they were collecting a new driver there especially for me), I sent a second request, and was taken aback by the answer - the driver is up-to-date and does not need updating! Unfortunately, they didn’t explain to me how a driver from two years ago can be relevant. This is probably the only negative aspect of communicating with the products of the Russian company DEPO - the complete lack of clear user support. Unfortunately, there is no complaints section on the site!

I start looking for a solution to this problem on the Internet - on websites and forums. And I quickly realize that I’m not the only one. In most cases (although it is impossible to judge how many such cases there are in reality - only those who have a problem write on forums) the driver does not really recognize the video card installed in the laptop. What this is connected with is not entirely clear. Most likely, the laptop manufacturers themselves are using chemicals.

And then a solution to the problem was finally found. Many thanks to obla4ko4240019, a member of the Ru-Board forum for the tips.

Attention! Everything written below applies only to video cards manufactured by nVidia. All examples were made for Windows Vista, but these steps will not differ much from Windows XP or Windows 7.
So, let's start in order:

1) We need fresh drivers for GeForce series desktop video cards. Desktop ones, since special drivers for mobile (laptop) solutions have their own differences, and this guide does not apply to them (and, as we have seen, they do not want to be installed).

You can get drivers from friends, acquaintances, or at work. If it's not available anywhere, you can download it. To do this, go to the nVidia website in the “Download drivers” section and fill out the form for a manual search. Please note that in the “Product series” field you must indicate the series without M, i.e. if, for example, GeForce 8600M is installed, then in the column we select not “GeForce 8M series (notebook)”, but simply “GeForce 8 series”. Select the OS, click the “Search” button and get a link to download the driver.

2) Now we need to determine the ID of our video card. Open system properties (right-click on the “My Computer” icon, then “Properties”), then device manager. We select “Video adapters”, in it we see our video card. Call the device properties, the “Details” tab, then “Hardware ID”. The lines will be displayed at the bottom, I have 4 of them, someone may have 3 or even one. We are interested in the string located between the second and third & signs of type: DEV_0425. This is the line we need. Write it down somewhere!

3) The downloaded driver file is actually an archive. Therefore, using any archiver (WinRAR or 7-Zip will do), unpack the file into any folder. We go into it after unpacking and look for the nv_disp.inf file. Now we face the most important step - to deceive the installer so that the installer decides that our video card is supported by the driver. We open this file with notepad, and approximately in the middle of the file we find lines like:
%NVIDIA_DEV.0191.01% = Section004, PCI\VEN_10DE&DEV_0191
%NVIDIA_DEV.0193.01% = Section004, PCI\VEN_10DE&DEV_0193
and so on.
Doesn't the very end of the line remind you of anything? That's right, our ID! We are looking for a line whose ending differs from ours by the last digit.
In my case this is the line:
%NVIDIA_DEV.0424.01% = Section010, PCI\VEN_10DE&DEV_0424
And now we change the last digit so that we get the ID of our video card:
%NVIDIA_DEV.0424.01% = Section010, PCI\VEN_10DE&DEV_0425
Next we go to the very end of the same file, where there are lines like:
NVIDIA_DEV.0040.01 = "NVIDIA GeForce 6800 Ultra"
NVIDIA_DEV.0041.01 = "NVIDIA GeForce 6800"
We look for a line among them in which DEV.XXXX matches the original ID before the change above:
NVIDIA_DEV.0424.01 = "NVIDIA GeForce 8400 GS"
And we change the name of our video card:
NVIDIA_DEV.0424.01 = "NVIDIA GeForce 8600M GS"
If you want to show off to your friends how cool your laptop is, you can even write this:
NVIDIA_DEV.0424.01 = "NVIDIA GeForce GTX 295 SLI"
After all, this line actually determines under what name your video card will be listed in the system. Just don't expect performance to increase based on the name of the graphics card!
Save the file.

4) Before installing a new driver, you must remove the old one. Go to Control Panel - Programs and Features (Add or Remove Programs in Windows XP) and uninstall the previous driver. Reboot, go to the folder with the driver and start the installation. During installation, the operating system may complain about the driver’s lack of certification - we agree to install that one too. After the process is completed, reboot.

I immediately go to the device manager - the driver version has indeed changed. This means the installation was successful!

After the update, I run the Vista performance test again - and here a pleasant surprise awaits me. The operating system, after recalculating the rating, raises my graphics values ​​for Aero to 4.7 (from 4.6), and graphics for games to 5.2 (from 5.1), thereby increasing the system rating from 4.6 to 4, 7.

With these simple steps you can update the driver on a discrete Nvidia video card in a laptop if the driver is not installed from the website and the laptop manufacturer does not provide a fresh driver.