Please help regarding NVIDIA Geforce 8800m GTX SLI

[xtracker85]

Hi fellas,

I have a peculiar problem and hope someone here could help me. I'm running Windows Vista 32bit and have a Dell XPS M1730 laptop with dual NVIDIA Geforce 8800m GTX. Recently, my computer all of a sudden couldn't boot into windows and I get the BSOD. I managed to trace the problem to a possible failure of one of my video cards. The only way to continue running my com is to disable the faulty card. The thing is it is quite difficult to do since the two cards are built as one.

Here is my problem. I've tried many different drivers and attempted to disable the faulty graphic card but all doesn't seem to work. I then installed an old driver from here, 178.24, and managed to turn off the faulty card from device manager and strangely got my com running again, as long as I keep the faulty card disabled and not update the drivers.

Now I don't know what is so special with the 178.24 driver that allows me to run on half a video card but it has given me hope that it may be possible to tweak something for newer drivers to use them. Does anyone know why I can run 178.24 driver and not other drivers? Is there a way to tweak the INF file or any file to achieve the same result as the 178.24 for more up to date drivers? I'm guessing this old driver doesn't check for SLI support which could explain why I can disable one of the faulty card and getting away with it.

I hope someone can help since I can't replace my video card because my warranty is up. Thanks in advance.