nVidia Drivers for Vista-64 and FSX Crashing (BSOD)

Well during some of the gap since I last posted an entry I’ve been literally pulling my hair out over the dreaded Blue Screen of Death (BSOD) with FSX in Vista-64. In short, I was experience constant random crashes with FSX (and several other games) leading to the BSOD. These crashes would occur without warning and at seemingly random intervals. Vista was generally useless when it came to diagnosing or fixing the problem simply, occasionally, stating that it was a problem with the “graphics driver.”

Obviously this leads to a totally useless situation when it comes to FSX since about 50% of the time my system would crash in the middle of a flight (talk about frustrating! ). My system is essentially state-of-the-art so there should be no issues with components not being able to handle the rigors of FSX (see previous entries regarding my system specs).

Thinking that perhaps some FSX file was corrupted I did a full re-install… still got regular BSODs.

Thinking that Vista SP1 would fix the issue I installed that… still got regular BSODs.

Thinking that perhaps something with Vista or another file was corrupted I reformatted my hard drive and did a fresh install of Vista and FSX… still got regular BSODs.

At this point I was really pulling my hair out. Then I came across this Slashdot entry which pointed out that over a quarter of all Vista crashes are caused by flaws in nVidia’s drivers.

After finding that I was then able to browse a variety of reports of widespread complaints regarding the instability of many of nVidia’s Vista drivers and in particular BSODs in high performance games. Eventually I came across some reports saying that one of the older Vista drivers (100.65) was much more stable than some of the more recent releases so I removed my “updated” driver and installed this older version. After that, I have yet to have a single BSOD in FSX (knock on wood). That would seem to be consistent with some of the other reports I’ve seen out in cyberspace. It’s possible that the older driver is not quite as efficient as some more recent releases (although I haven’t noticed much difference), but of course I’ll always take stability over performance.

So anyway, I thought that little tidbit might be useful to anyone else out there being plagued by lots of BSODs with FSX (especially if indications are that the BSOD is caused by something to do with the graphics card or driver). Give the older 100.65 driver a try and see if helps you run a more stable system.

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P.S. It’s been a while since I last posted… (some people have messaged me asking where I’ve gone ). I haven’t given up or anything just have been busy with some traveling and other projects. Since this is all just a hobby for my free time, when I have some, I don’t have a regular schedule for posting and just pop something up when I notice something interesting that I think may be of interest or assistance to others. Thanks for the comments I’ve received thus far both on this site and my YouTube videos.