Upgrading my Graphics card

[CK1]

I took delivery this morning of my new XFX GTX 260 / 216 graphics card which is to replace my 8800GTS 640. Currently I am running with v174 drivers. I have the latest v180 downloaded but not installed yet.

Should this be a simple operation of removing the old card and putting the new one in and the drivers will automatically recognise the new card or should I uninstall the drivers and then re-install the latest drivers when I do the swap over?

I apologise in advance if this is a silly question, but I have only upgraded graphics cards in the past when I have upgraded the rest of the system and hence re-installed XP.

Regards

CK

[Madafwo]

Uninstall the drivers - You can use the Nvidia option in Add/Remove programs or something like Driver Cleaner

When it asks if you want to restart the system say no and shut it down.

Swap the cards out taking all normal precautions.

Power the system up and install the drivers.

[!TIMMY!]

Uninstall the drivers - You can use the Nvidia option in Add/Remove programs or something like Driver Cleaner

When it asks if you want to restart the system say no and shut it down.

Swap the cards out taking all normal precautions.

Power the system up and install the drivers.

Spot on. The 180 drivers are meant to increase performance quite a bit over the 17x drivers.

[choongsta]

Some of my games run better on the older drivers. When I upgrade the drivers they start running slow again.

[BigGlenn]

Spot on. The 180 drivers are meant to increase performance quite a bit over the 17x drivers.

A mate of mine put the 180 drivers on his machine and then told me not to bother as they caused him all sorts of problems so I am going to stick with the 178 (I think) drivers for the time being as everything works fine for me

[Pob255]

And remember when you boot back up with the new card in what ever you do DON'T let the windows hardware wizard to try to install it.
Just cancel the wizard that should make windows use default vga drivers, then run the nvidia driver exe

[CK1]

Thanks for the comments guys it was much appreciated!

I unistalled the old drivers, and then shut the machine down. Took out the old card (8800GTS) which I thought was big enough only to discover that the GTX260 was 3cm longer and wouldn't fit with my case in its current configuration. I had to move one of my hard disks down to the lower chamber and remove all the hard disk trays from the upper chamber. I now cannot put any future hard disks in this chamber! When I bought it I thought the Antec p182 was a plenty big enough case. Are graphics cards getting too big? Maybe thats a question for another thread.

Anyway, I then booted Windows back up and installed the English International drivers that I had downloaded at work and took home on a flash drive (it took 10 secs to download 107MB, how fast is that!). However I got a message saying that the drivers couldn't install properly as a file was corrupt. I rebooted and it took me into the display setup wizard and I proceeded through this choosing all the right settings for my monitor. Then when I hit apply the worst thing happened! A blank screen. it didn't adjust back after 15 secs to I had to reboot into VGA mode and uninstall the drivers.

I then downloded the drivers from nvidia.com again and this time they wouldn't unpack. The message that saome of them were corrupt came up. Before you ask I did delete the unpacking folder (C:\NVIDIA\) each time I tried. This was getting annoying.

I looked around the web site and downloaded the English US version which installed without a problem. I haven't test the card with any games yet. I will look at doing this at the weekend.

Has anyone else had problems with the Nvidia English International drivers or is it just my bad luck?

Thanks for you help once again.

Regards