Can't upgrade NVIDIA GeForce 310M display driver on Acer Aspire 5745PG

Question

I've been for days already trying to update my video driver. I have an Acer Aspire 5745PG with a "NVIDIA GeForce 310M" board, and I was trying to run Sony Vegas video editor with Boris Continunn plugins. It happened that some of the plugins, like BCC Text Extrude wouldn't work, showing the message "Insufficient depth resolution to run Blue". I then read somewhere that updating the display driver would do the trick. That was when my nightmares started, I lost already good 3 nights trying to sort this out, without success :(

The display driver that was before (and that I current have after restoring) was the version 8.16.11.8997.

First thing I tried was downloading the 8.17.12.6619 driver directly from Acer, which was shown as the latest version from Acer website: http://support.acer.com/product/default.aspx?modelId=2466

Running it would say "Diver Package Failure - Setup failed to read the required Display Driver to be used with this package"

I then tried directly the NVIDIA own driver, which the latest was version 296.10: http://us.download.nvidia.com/Windows/296.10/296.10-notebook-win7-winvista-64bit-international-whql.exe That gave me similar error message :/

So after some researching I found out that some people had the same issue and they had to change the configuration file to allow the installer to recognize this NVIDIA board: http://forums.nvidia.com/index.php?showtopic=222904

That topic said to look for the "Device Instance Id" property of the "NVIDIA GeForce 310M" display , which I couldn't find, instead I found the "Hardware Id", which seemed to be the right one.

I followed the instructions and changed the inf file first for the Acer installation, and after for the NVIDIA own driver. It actually managed to go ahead with the installation in both instances, but the only thing I got was a black screen, while the computer still apeared to be running fine. I had to hard reset, and then it would come back with generic vga driver. I could only get my display back using the recovery function.

I imagine thousands of this notebook was sold, and it can't have its driver updated??

Could someone help me with this??

Thanks Echo

Solution

Go to BIOS setup. Go to graphics options and select discrete instead of switchable.

Save and restart. After the reboot, wait for your PC to install the required NVIDIA drivers automatically. This might take some time depending on your internet connection speed.

Once done, reboot. After the reboot, download the latest graphics drivers from NVIDIA and install them.

Comments

[BJ292]

Do you have the latest bios and have you tried using the Acer update utility?

[Emerson]

I tried using this modded inf file: forums.laptopvideo2go.com/topic/… But I just got the same result, a blank screen, followed by a restart in VGA mode, nvidia would then re-install until the end and ask to restart, after this second restart, I get a vga display, and the device manager shows the "NVIDIA GeForce 310M" as "This device is working properly." anb the version as 8.17.13.132.

[Emerson]

But when I try running the NVIDIA control panel, it shows the same error message saying "NVIDIA Display settings are not available", and "You are not currently using a display attached to an NVIDIA GPU."

[Emerson]

Hi abin, that option on the BIOS is fixed, can't be changed...

[Admin]

It can using a BIOS update available on the acer site for the 5745pg.

[agentnega]

BIOS 1.15 or later have the setting locked to switchable. You'd have to downgrade to old BIOS to unlock it. Someone made a request here (bios-mods.com/forum/…) for BIOS with unlocked graphics setting but sadly it never materialized.

[agentnega]

BIOS 1.11 has the graphics setting unlocked. I successfully downgraded my BIOS, set mode to discrete and installed the latest 314.07 NVIDIA driver package. I hope the improvements in the later BIOSes aren't crucial...