Railworks America

I am curious as to which I should use. I have a Nvidia 740M 2GB

Nvidia recommends getting the latest drivers from the laptop maker's website, but you can download the latest "m" drivers from their site. Reason being is that some manufacturers will customize the drivers; Nvidia's ones are "stock".

Which are better? I've never seem a whole lot of difference between custom or stock, with the rare occasion the custom drivers were really goofed up and either caused damage (Alien Ware comes to mind- burned up onboard cards by changing clock speeds way too high) or just didn't work.

It's been my experience that you want to stick with the manufacturer's laptop model specific drivers on laptops. I've read this on the net too. Before I read that stuff, I updated my drivers to AMD's latest about a month after using my THEN new laptop. Big mistake!!!

If memory serves me right, I think my frame rates suffered a bit. But the biggest problems were that I could no longer manually assign applications power profiles...also known as Switchable Graphics. That let's me decide if I want an application to always run in Power Saving mode (1.4GHz-2.7GHz CPU speed, use the integrated GPU) or High Performance mode (3.2 GHz turbo mode, switch to the dedicated GPU card if one is installed). AMD stopped support for Switchable Graphics in newer catalyst control centers and drivers.

I also updated the Grossfire "Dual Graphics" game profile list. That was my 2nd big mistake!!! Manually setting and saving of custom Crossfire profiles stopped working too as a result.

So I did a fresh HP factory re-install and everything was back to normal with HP's custom drivers back in place. Laptop motherboards tend to be a much more customized hardware than their desktop brethren. That's why their drivers tend to be so much more customized and specialized than desktop computer drivers.

Not sure this will be the case for a Nvidia card. It might be fine, but I'm skeptical.

I say... be willing to go back to a full factory re-install if you test out new drivers directly from Nvidia and it fails. In MY particular case, simply reverting back to an earlier restore point didn't fix it. Neither did re-installing the laptop's custom drivers fix it. Those new drivers and Crossfire profiles somehow screwed up my laptop so permanently that apparently the full factory re-install was required to bring things back to normal.

So stick with the manufacturer's drivers if I was you. Proceed with caution otherwise.

What about Intel Drivers?

arizonachris wrote:(Alien Ware comes to mind- burned up onboard cards by changing clock speeds way too high)

Hmmm, I wonder if that's what happened to the GTX695 in my Alienware M17XR4. They replaced the first one when it failed, but the new one lasted only a year (and the warranty on the replacement was for a mere three months!)

bpetit wrote:What about Intel Drivers?

They are usually a ways behind the NVidia drivers, but usually work just fine.

Toshiba is such an butt.

"The driver being installed is not validated for this computer"

This error message mean that your laptop manufacturer blocked generic driver installation for your laptop and in most cases there it's done for completely no reason.

So no dice there.