Question about downloading/installing drivers

Whenever an issue with hardware like a GPU comes up, the first thing most people advise to do is to download new drivers for it. I have done this a few times for my Nvidia card, but I seem to be unable to properly install the new driver.

For example, I recently got Nvidia's most current driver which supports my card, but when I run the setup to install it, I get a message that says something to the effect of no hardware can be found that supports it. I have done it a couple of times in the past, with the then current drivers, and I had the same problem. I also had a similar problem when I tried to install a new driver for my MB chipset...only with that, the setup ran, but nothing seemed to happen.

What am I doing wrong? What is the proper way to install a newer driver?

Well I was going to tell you to install the chipset drivers but it seems that your having problems with that one as well. Has this always happened since you put the pc together? What chipset for both mobo and video card? Did you try running drive cleaner to get rid of the older drives first?

Avg said:

Well I was going to tell you to install the chipset drivers but it seems that your having problems with that one as well. Has this always happened since you put the pc together? What chipset for both mobo and video card? Did you try running drive cleaner to get rid of the older drives first?

Click to expand...

I have always seemed to have problems installing new drivers. I think I did it correctly once, but I don't remember what I did and I think it messed with my video card so I rolled back to the original driver. My mobo chipset is a 3.2 Ghz P4HT (2 cpus) and my video is Nvidia GeForce 5500fx 256MB.

I actually still have the drivers for both that I downloaded sitting in a folder, so I could try to run them again if I knew the proper way to go about it. I uninstalled the video driver not too long ago, and tried to install the new one, but then windows would not detect my video card and I have restore the system to get the driver back. Isn't it something about rolling the old driver out and then installing the new one, as opposed to unstalling the old driver? I think that's what I did before.

I am unfamiliar with driver cleaner. Is it in Windows, or is it a utility I have to DL?

These are the drivers I have:

Intel Chipset Installation Utility 7.0.0.1019
71.84 winxp64_english

You can download driver cleaner online, it's free from driver heaven. So just uninstall the previous drivers reboot and use driver cleaner to get rid of whatever is left.

I pretty much know where to go in order to find the video drivers, but where exactly do I need to go to find the mb chipset driver? Would I look in the device manager under "Processors" where it actually show the chips, or would I look at one of the System Devices?

With my drivers I go into add or remove in the control panel and remove my drivers, but with my experiences with Intel chipsets the drivers came from windows update and couldn't be uninstalled but these were old chipsets, I don't know about the new ones.