nVidia Driver circus
 

I have recently wasted better part of a day chasing an illusive driver for an nVidia Vanta LT 8 MB AGP card. I downloaded several drivers including the official unified architechture driver from the official nVida site. The driver was approved for XP and 2000. That driver (the official nVidia one) as well as the several un official ones did not work. I have great respect for nVidia. Thier products are great.

However, In my opinion the product is no better than the driver support database that is available to computer service personnel that are charged with repairing and upgrading equipment. The "one size fits all" driver really is a pain. You cannto install the driver like a driver (ie through device manager and hardware install wizard). The driver is an install (ie compresed .exe) that loads itself up. When I try to install my video card, the nVidia driver pack on steroids gets confused. It gives me an error, saying the data is invalid.

nVidia is one of the leaders in the business, however as good as they are and impressed as I am I will not use thier product under any circumstances. Drivver support is so crucial. The can, and really must do better.

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Agreed. Their support for older cards is ... lacking. It is one way to gently hint that an upgrade is in order.

you can install normally if you find the temp directory once the setup is started, just alt-tab and find and copy the extracted files.

Better yet, just do a Google search for the chipset that is being used on the card itself. If it has ID information, then do a Google on that. I have found drivers for almost any device that way. (even unsupported Canoscan drivers for Win2K :) )

I work in the support section as well, so I have plently of personal experience :D