Almost no drivers work for me... Please help.

[AyaJulia]

Long story short: Every driver I attempt to install, save two, fails for one of three reasons:

1. During installation, I get the following error: "Windows found driver software for your device but encountered an error while attempting to install it."

2. After rebooting, I get a BSOD and have to revert to a driverless system via system restore.

3. After rebooting, Windows boots up with the following error reported in the device manager: "Windows has stopped this device because it has reported problems. (Code 43)"

Details:

-Laptop model: Alienware Area51 m5500

-Video card: GeForce 8600M GT (0407).

-Subsys ID: 0770152D

-Known good drivers:

---176.37- Came with the laptop, still works mostly, but some of my software crashes with it.

---186.81- Doesn't crash any of my software, but flickers obnoxiously here and there.

-OS: Windows 7 32 bit

There are some new games coming out that I'd really like to play. My laptop performs VERY poorly on benchmarks, and I'm looking to squeeze all the performance I can out of this sucker since I'm too poor to upgrade for quite some time. I've spent days on this site before, downloading, installing, rebooting, and reverting, before I finally gave up and settled on the flickery thing that didn't crash my software. I'd REALLY like to get this working.

Since I've asked about this issue before and been asked this--Yes, I'm definitely using this site's modded .inf files. Yes, I'm sure. Really sure. :)

Thanks VERY much for any help anyone might offer.

[AyaJulia]

68 Views--No one has heard of anything like this happening? :)

[quipster]

Use a program called "Powermizer Switch" to turn off the Powermizer function of the card

and the flicker will disappear.

This program should also work, it might even be the better one of the two alternatives: http://somemorebytes.com/wp/index.php/nvpmmanager

Edited June 18, 2010 by quipster