If it aint broken..... Dont fix it... is todays lesson of the day.
Some of you may recall Ive been having horrendous problems with my PC over the past few months, but Ive not had time to look into it properly as I was beginning to fear a full o/s install was the way forward.
My problems started whilst I was messing around with NIC settings, and had decided I was going to upgrade the drivers, and whilst I was at it... Id upgrade a pile of others.
Shortly after that I started seeing blue screens/ black screens and all other sorts of weirdness.
Im posting here in case it helps anyone else in the same situation.
Logitech Setpoint 6.61.15 driver version 5.60.73A little while ago I discovered that the Logitech Setpoint software was without doubt the cause of certain programs not opening automatically - such as Adobe CS, Excel, Word, Firefox when you clicked on any associated files, eventually causing a system hang.
If I uninstall setpoint then all programs will behave normally. This can be repeated. Unfortunately though turning off setpoint means that my mouse and keyboard dont have full functionality. A roll back to previous version doesn't seem to work, but having endlessly searched the internet, it seems that this problem crops up on various versions of setpoint for various people but no pattern has been found.
As a work around I currently have Setpoint disabled during start up, but once windows has fully loaded I can manually start setpoint myself by creating a shortcut to my desktop. I've no idea why the problem only exists if setpoint is loaded during windows startup. Its almost like it causes windows to forget any file associations.
NVidia drivers 9.18.13.3182Ohhhhhhh dear where to start with this one. The drivers release date is 11th of Nov, but by
the 19th of Nov I was in big trouble and its why I have hardly been able to use my PC since. I'd looked for a solution at the time but couldnt find anything pointing to the drivers. Not having had proper time to investigate again over the pre-mas and xmas period and a roll back not having worked, I was strongly suspecting it was either my graphics card or a drivers issue which would require me to completely start again with Windows. Something I dreaded as I knew this is a mammouth task even with back-up.
Anyhows today I look again at this.. and theres now literally hundreds of people on various forums with an Nvidia GeForce GTX 500 series complaining of the blue and black screen issue. Despite nvidia trying to look into this, there still isnt a permanent solution as various new releases havent solved the issue for many. This is grim news and some users are even reporting total loss (fry) of the Graphics card due to the upgrade.
Ive completely uninstalled the drivers and found an old version 9.18.13.1106 dated 18/01/2013 which seem stable. Touch wood, my PC has actually been on all day without any blue or black screening. Im just hoping that Ive escaped any permanent damage. Ive not dared to a stress test yet :/
Links to nvidia - theres now literally hundreds of posts about this - but these were the important ones for me.
Monitor display blank screen issue after driver update
Official NVIDIA 331.82 WHQL Display Driver Feedback Thread (Released 11/19/13)------
Guess Im now going to be very dubious about doing any driver updates