Dell Laptop NVIDIA Driver

I bought a Dell laptop with an NVIDIA graphics card. The vido game Bioshock would crash on it so I tried to update the display driver. When I attempted to do so, I got this error message:

The NVIDIA Setup program could not locate any drivers that are compatible with your current hardware. Setup will now exit.

It turns out that NVIDIA supports installation for the 8800, but not the 8800M. If you dig around on the NVIDIA website, you can find this hint:

Dell requires that you download the driver for your GPU from their support site.

You can find more information at: http://support.dell.com/.

The GeForce M series and GeForce Go series notebook GPUs use drivers that have been customized by the notebook manufacturers to support hot key functions, power management functions, lid close and suspend/resume behavior. NVIDIA has worked with some notebook manufacturers to provide notebook-specific driver updates, however, most notebook driver updates must come from the notebook manufacturer. Additionally, the desktop GeForce graphics drivers will not install on Geforce M series and Quadro M series notebook GPU's.

Unfortunately the customized driver that Dell provides is the outdated version I needed to replace in order to get Bioshock working. I was stuck with a new laptop with a new video card that could not run the new video games.

After many hours of searching the Web, I finally found a solution at LaptopVideo2Go.com. They provide a customized installation configuration file of a recent version of the NVIDIA display drivers for your laptop. Now I have had problems with the suspend/resume function since I installed the driver but at least I can play my new games now. Until Dell or NVIDIA start providing installation configuration files for the latest NVIDIA display drivers for the Dell laptop, LaptopVideo2Go might be your only solution.

Speaking of video games, I love the Orange Box.