NVIDIA 285 Updates: GeForce 8800/9800 users please read

One of the beautiful things about having two Dell M1730 laptops in my household is I can test the problems between them, since the 8800GTX and 9800GTX in the, respectively, usually come up with identical errors...

Some people may be experiencing issues with the 285 update such as black screens, frozen computers or fatal driver errors. The problem is not the driver itself; it's the 3D Vision Controller Driver. Because the GeForce 8 & 9 Series cards were built before 3D Vision was released, they are not entirely compatible with the technology. The 3D Vision driver will run fine and dandy on the machine, and actually improve the running of certain new games (Crysis 2, for example) with the old GPU.

However, the controller driver is completely incompatible with these cards and should not be installed, or it may fry your GPU.  You also cannot directly install the latest beta driver unless you have installed the one before it, as they are part of stress tests for Battlefield 3 Beta on the CUDA cores. I will be continuing to check these issues and have a thread on the NVIDIA Forums, located here.

For those like us who have an 8800GT/GTX or a 9800GTX, please follow the instructions below:

1. The safest, most-recent Verde WHQL driver is version 257.21. Download and extract this to the “NVIDIA” folder of your machine, but do not install it.
2. Uninstall the current, buggy driver and completely delete the folder it corresponds to.
3. Reboot the computer.
4. After the 275.21 driver has been automatically installed, install the 285.27 beta driver under the advanced option, making sure to uncheck the “3D Vision Controller Driver”.
5. Finally, install the 285.38 Beta drivers on top using the same method.

Reboot is not required, though people should be prepared to rollback to version 257.21 until the beta drivers have been fully tested by NVIDIA. I don't know about the other cards but I assume they will function the same way, given those GPUs are based on the same design.