How to : Nvidia mobile GPUs and drivers

That old driver story

You bought a laptop a while ago. Now you want to reinstall Windows and you'd like to get the latest versions of all drivers. However, Nvidia has a surprise for you: they don't offer the latest versions of their drivers with support for all the mobile devices. Read this post to find out more about this issue and how you could fix it.


Why you should want to use the latest WHQL driver

Nvidia releases new drivers often. These drivers add fixes, increase performance in various 3D applications and games, add new features, support for new technologies.
Cleaning up the previous driver and installing the latest is something that some gamers do and all should do.

While some people may just want the drivers because of the sole wish of having the latest and greatest, some experience instability with the drivers they were given from the manufacturer (.e.g.: the machine is instable, games crash because of the driver, etc).
For these individuals, having a newer driver which may fix their problems isn't simply something they feel like having, it's something they actually need.

Nvidia, laptops and driver issues

You're used to downloading the latest driver for your Nvidia based display adapter and install it right away, no matter if you're using XP, Vista or Windows 7. You try to do the same thing for your laptop, you download the latest driver, you try to install it and then a message tells you that no device was detected. That means, according to the entries found in the .inf file, there is no Nvidia GPU in the system.
Now you either have to use an older driver and try to see if getting a .inf for your driver fixes it.

Nvidia, help me, please

Let's say you don't know what to do beyond what you tried and simply try to contact Nvidia and have them offer you some support. You submit a support request, they reply. You read the reply and it's something along the lines "We're sorry, but we can't provide drivers for your Nvidia GPU. You need to ask your laptop's manufacturer for new drivers because there are differences between laptops and special mods are required. You can try to get a driver from www.laptopvide2go.com.".

That was easy, they just told you they can't give you updated drivers and that you need to rely on your notebook manufacturer to release drivers tweaked for your laptop's GPU.
However, that's only half true, the manufacturer only customizes basic things and the chip is 100% the same in all notebooks who have the same GPU, so they could provide a driver which just works for most people. Some people may have a bug or two.

Further on, they sent you to a third party site, laptopvideo2go.com . It's easy for them to do this, build hardware and then tell their clients to go get support from a third party. They earn the money from chip sales and laptopvideo2go is supposed to help you out with the fixes they create and offer on their site. "Nice" of you, Nvidia.

Your laptop's maker doesn't like their clients either

Some manufacturers offer old drivers. Let's have an example of a manufacturer we will not be naming.

The laptop was launched and released around January 2007. The latest driver for Windows XP was on 13 September 2007, driver version 84.68. Now, we're in 2009, they must have been really busy and unable to release a newer driver for that laptop.

If we visit Nvidia's website, we find a 179.48 BETA driver for that same GPU. While this is a beta, there were some previous versions which were stable and WHQL certified and could have worked great with that GPU.

Some could argue that most drivers are at their newest version and that those versions are posted on the manufacturer's support webpage.
That's not true. Here are a few examples: you can go to realtek's website to get the latest drivers for realtek audio chipsets and realtek NICs (network adapters), to Intel's website for the latest Intel Wireless drivers, Intel chipset drivers (Intel Inf Update Utility) and others.

Therefore, your manufacturer may be ignoring the new drivers the makers of the various components release. They don't have them on their support page and that's a big problem for Nvidia's GPUs.

Fixing what the big boys won't

This part is meant for more advanced users who have been using their PC for a while. Your GPU acceleration might get deactivated if you install a driver which doesn't like your laptop's GPU.

This is a trial and error process and isn't guaranteed to work. Do not attempt it if you're not sure you can live 20 minutes to 2 hours or so without having your GPU function without acceleration.

More than that, you might have to seek your current driver and reinstall that if the ones you try don't work and/or the new ones have some issues due to some customization.

The .inf holds information about the devices that driver should recognise and work with. However, simply adding your GPU there via the laptopvideo2go's enhancer doesn't guarantee that it will work with your GPU. Nvidia may have removed support for older mobile GPUs from the latest drivers.

Notes:
- the latest driver doesn't support mobile 5000 series GPUs (nor non-mobile) - don't even try it, use some 175.xy driver for them and use the same guide as for the latest (just select the 175.xy version you are going to use in the Enhancer driver selection drop down)

- some GPUs may not be supported, take care and be prepared to reinstall an older driver (the one you had before, for example), in case the guide doesn't work

1) What OS do you have? XP/Vista/Win7
2) Go here to find out which is the latest WHQL certified driver version, write the version number down (e.g. 190.38 was the latest WHQL certified version when this article was being written)
3) Download that driver from laptopvideo2go, make sure you choose the version for your OS, same page as step 2
3) Go here to start creating an .inf
4) Choose the driver version from the Driver Selection drop down - select the previously found driver, the latest WHQL driver (at the time of the writing, 190.38)
5) You should leave other settings untouched, unless you REALLY know what you're doing (no, thinking you do isn't enough, you really need to know)
6) Click "submit" - this will download a file for you nv4_disp.inf
6) Download and install 7zip from here (free, open-source, trojan-and-spyware FREE)
7) Right click on the nvidia driver (190.38_desktop_winxp_32bit_english_whql.exe, in our case), 7zip->Extract to "...." ( in our case, it's Extract to "190.38_desktop_winxp_32bit_english_whql")
8) Copy the nv4_disp.inf, the one you got from laptopvideo2go to the folder to which the driver was extracted
9) Start installing the driver
10) Reboot and enjoy it

That should be it. I hope this worked for you.

Disclaimer

We're not being paid by any third party to write this article and we do not hate Nvidia or dislike their products.
We hope some their policies regarding mobile GPUs will change. We can say the same about laptop makers.
We didn't mention any laptop maker company here to avoid scaring away their potential clients, this is a problem which affects most of them (from what we know).

That's all, folks

I really hope you liked this article and that it may also be useful to those of you who own laptops with Nvidia GPUs. Please leave a comment below to let us know how this worked for you.