HIDevolution P650HP6-G broken nVIDIA graphics driver

Hello! I've been using this P650HP6-G for more than 3 years now, and I am quite satisfied with it. However, recently my laptop restarted on its own and froze on the Windows login screen. This occurred after a nVIDIA driver update a day ago, so I reverted the driver to an older version. While the driver installer finished installing the actual driver, Windows froze a few seconds later (screen showed the last image before freeze, didn't turn off or anything). The same thing with the freezing occurred after another restart. The only way I could fix it was by running DDU in safe mode and restarting, which left me with an archaic version of nVIDIA graphics driver from 2017 (the only one that works though).

I found this thread on the nVIDIA forums, which almost mirrors my situation. The user didn't explain much other than "EDID corruption" & pointed to here. The problem is I cannot seem to boot from a USB since any sort of Linux just freezes on boot (probably due to the same problem with the graphics?). Could someone help me understand how I might be able to fix my graphics driver? I doubt its a hardware issue with the GPU since the driver from 2017 works fine. Thank you so much!

 

Hello,

You may search on what EDID is and understand that it's not related to your problem. An EDID corruption end with an unusable screen because the screen is no more recognised. Even a reboot or whatever you'll try will not flash your EDID back.
Regarding your problem, you may try to use your laptop with the old driver from 2017 and see if everything work normally. Being unable to boot Linux can mean a hardware failure. If it really was a driver problem, you'll be able to boot into Linux without trouble.

 

With regards to EDID, I do agree that it doesn’t seem like it would be related. However, I’m going off of what the anonymous user with the same laptop & problem said 4 months ago (in the nVIDIA forum thread). Perhaps they may have accidentally applied some other fix?

Yeah, I think I’ll try running my laptop on the 2017 driver for now, and see if I can play my games. I really don’t understand why the old driver would work though if it is a hardware problem.

 

For now, test some games to confirm your 1060 is working fine.
Latest Nvidia drivers have lots of bugs looking at the changelog.

 

I'm fairly sure I tried installing older drivers that had been working for me before, and the same things happened. I checked the crashdumps with BlueScreenView, and these were the 2 highlighted rows:

I tried setting TdrDelay in the registry as well, but that did nothing.

 

Well, it seems like a hardware failure then. Let it cool down a bit and clean the cooling system (fans...) to see if it's working better.
EDIT : why is your nvlddmkm.sys from 2020?

 

That doesn't really explain why my system doesn't crash with 2017 drivers though? (to be fair, I haven't run anything to stress the GPU yet). I've left my laptop alone for almost 2 weeks now, so if it is a hardware failure I'm kinda screwed. Support from HIDevolution said that the model is already end-of-life

The 2020 is coming from the date of the crash, not the driver version.

 

Sorry but we're not the 11/07/2020 and the date on the watchdog.sys is strange too. Is your CMOS battery OK?

 

That's my bad, this was taken on 11/07. I do not know why the date on watchdog.sys is like that, however.

 

Just an update, but the laptop with the OEM 2017 nVidia VGA drivers (version 382.05, 22.21.13.8205) works fine. I played a few games with no performance issue. This is so weird... I guess for now I'll stick to these drivers. Hopefully I can find a reason why newer drivers completely stopped working.