Horrible VGA driver experiences

[Guest]

In light of my frustrations today with Catalyst and Geforce drivers, I decided to vent my anger here.

 

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I uninstalled R331 the night before, in preparation for replacing my GT 640 with my R9 280X. Initial swap went fine. 

 

So...I booted to a black screen. I cold booted again, and this time it worked, albeit at a lower resolution and using "Microsoft Basic Display Adapter". 

 

Then...Windows Update actually detected my card and installed some old Catalyst drivers, so my card was detected as HD 7900. I downloaded 14.4 from AMD's website and installed it so it recognized as R9 200 series.

 

Then...BF3 wouldn't play nice, so I "repaired" the game to no avail, then uninstalled BF3 and Origin. SUDDENLY, Nvidia Display Driver 326.xx ALL OF A SUDDEN APPEARS IN MY PROGRAMS LIST. I uninstalled it...

 

...only to find that the Start Button had stopped working. So I restarted explorer.exe...to have a broken loop as explorer.exe restarted and crashed, restarted and crashed, etc.

 

Then...I cold booted only to find that I was stuck at a black screen with the mouse and keyboard repeatedly trying to initialize and failing, initializing and failing, etc...

 

...tried to boot into Safe Mode...couldn't do that as I was stuck at Windows logo...spamming F8 only actually worked once without the USB...

 

...spent 30 minutes making a bootable Win 8.1 USB on my laptop...never actually officially worked as Windows 7 USB Download Tool "failed" at 99% when it actually was successful...

 

Restored to earlier this morning. No problems except a whole bunch of phantom programs (including Nvidia 326.xx which I removed using Display Driver Uninstaller) that I had to get rid of and clean out of the registry. Reinstalled Origin and BF3 and I'm finally 100% a-ok.

 

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I came to the conclusion that AMD and Nvidia are both assholes for making drivers that can't really be uninstalled, and don't even TRY to work alongside one another. I figured that 326.xx was probably a roll-back driver, which still didn't make sense because Nvidia Control Panel refuses to start if you have an AMD card. Kudos to Windows Update for taking part in f**king up my system today.

 

That was enough stress for today.

 

Feel free to share your experiences with VGA drivers as well.

[RelentlessAF]

Oh god your signature hurts my eyes

[Puma911]

I've had issues with Catalyst but none with Geforce. I find the Geforce software to be really fantastic compared to the red team's software. Just personal preference.

 

But holy balls man. If I went through what you described over installing a new GPU I would have screamed/cried/broken something.

[Inkz]

I have never had a issue with either driver and I have used both of them. I would say just uninstall one before switching and you should be fine.