Drivers
 

Alright, so i just installed a new nvidea card, and when i did, windows did some automatic download of drivers. Due to my steam problem, however, steam reccomended downloading new drivers. So i went to the Nvidia website and used their auto-download service, being 99% sure that it would tell me if the driver was already installed. After installing it, however, mozilla firefox popped up with this text when i tried to run it:

nvidia display driver files from different (incompatible) versions of the driver have been detected. NVIDIA OpenGL acceleration is disabled to maintain system stability. to resolve this problem, update the NVIDIA display driver. The latest driver is available at http://www.nvidia.com

So i have a few questions.

1. What's the problem?
2. Did i need to uninstall any old drivers?
3. How can i resolve this?

...Sorry for being such a technoob x.x

uninstalling old drivers isn't necessary but it is possible to get the wrong drivers by mistake. usually the drivers windows installs are fine.

what card is it?

Nvidia GeForce 9400GT.

So i might've installed the same driver twice? How can i fix that? x.x

dun think it was the wrong one, though, cos nvidia pointed out the correct card and all that.

it wouldn't install twice, it would just install over the old one but it should be fine. you can try going to device manager and uninstalling the driver. it should find it and reinstall it itself after you do. if it doesn't just run windows update again.

oh yea, what operating system do you have? that's what happened when i got the wrong drivers. for some reason the url was messed up and it gave me the wrong one.

Windows 7. But that really doesnt explain the firefox errors...

Also, should i restart? it said i should before the driver would take effect.

EDIT: Gahhh, Civ IV isnt working either... can i just restore to a previous version? if so, how? x.x

Double edit: About to uninstall the drivers so they'll reinstall themselves. just wanna make sure... you're SURE this'll work?

gah, sorry, had to go afk.

uninstalling should fix the problem of firefox detecting two and like i said if it doesn't automatically reinstall then you can just run windows update and use that one.

oh restart before you uninstall or anything.

okay, one last thing...

theres no chance of a bsod if i restart, right?

Make sure to install the drivers that correspond to the correct architecture of your operating system.

what do you mean by that? o.o

32bit or 64 bit. i'm guessing you're on 64 bit though.

Yeah, thats me, just hadnt gotten the lingo. x.x

im PRETTY sure that's what i downloaded... it doesnt show specific drivers on the uninstalling programs though. just Nvidia Drivers in general.

So its safe to reboot? It wont go into the BSoD or anything?

And thanks again for all the help. im sorry for being such an ubernoob. x.x

yea it should be safe to restart. if it was gonna BSOD it would have already. even if it does BSOD then restart and tap F8 on startup (before windows starts to load) and from the list choose safe mode. you can uninstall the drivers from there.

Alright, restarted and everything seems to work properly... When i play Civ IV, though, the screen goes black and the speakers make a strange buzzing noise. But Dr. Google said it's probably due to overheating... so i'll clean out my comp and see if that helps.

That probably isnt a driver thing though, considering the buzzing, right?

how often does it happen?

Just once every 10-20 minutes when i play Civ IV. Not anytime else.