this post actually has absolutely nothing to do with Charles Dickens or with the tale of his book, but is rather simply a play on words: I had one driver, they had another but wouldn’t give it to me. But as these things go, you find a way, and now I’m reporting about it and storing my research here, hopefully to assist others in the same predicament.

I have a MSI MS-1022 (or S425) laptop. It’s a great piece of hardware, I am absolutely pleased with it. And I admit, I’m a gamer, and made sure to get a non-standard graphics chip, but something that could at least handle some games. For those occasions when I actually get a little down-time and want to immerse myself in a 3d environment. This laptop comes with the Nvidia Go 6200 chip.

I purchased Portal the week after it was released – I had been waiting some time, well over a year, for the release of this game, and had been hyping it up to nearly everybody I know who has an interest in games and 3d thinking. So I was pretty dis-pleased when my machine started getting NV4_disp.dll blue-screen errors. The obvious solution, I thought, was to simply update the laptop video drivers. Should be simple enough.

The hunt begins

I went to the Nvidia forums and website to search for recent drivers. Unfortunately everything I found there seemed to want to redirect me to my laptop manufacturer. Strange, i thought. Some simple searching corroborated this: another user also looking for 6200 drivers in June had someone reply,

Laptop drivers have to come from the manufacturer of the laptop.

I go to the MSI page for my laptop only to find the driver release date listed as 2006 Jan 06! That’s over 20 months ago! In 20 months Nvidia have released 2 more generations of video cards! Still, I download them. Needless to say they didn’t work.

Further investigation found that most Nvidia products now use a ‘Unified Driver Architecture’ which helps Nvidia streamline their driver release across multiple versions and generations of video cards. But for some unknown reason, it doesn’t apply to laptops !?!

However as I’ve learned, the point of computers is to hack them to do what you want! There’s always a way!

It took some time – more time than I would like to acknowledge – but eventually I found this thread over on the laptopvideo2go forums which offered a driver hack, released just a week earlier, which allowed for updated driver support for Go 6200 graphics cards, using the version 163.75 drivers.

(note: in the month that has passed since I encountered this problem, the drivers have been updated to 169!)

I’m making the 163.75 drivers available here for backup purposes: I KNOW they work with my machine (see image below) and should I ever need to reinstall drivers on my own laptop, I can just come here and retrieve the software! They work with my XP SP2 install, that’s all that matters to me! Others can feel free to download the drivers here, or find the latest stable version over on the laptopvideo2go forums.

For now, game on!
a portal in Portal

download v163.75 drivers for Nvidia GeForce Go 6200 (36.1Mb exe)

geekathon