Windows 10: NVIDIA Driver installation freezing laptop/causing black screen

Hello,

I have had my Alienware M15 R2 with 2070 Max Q for over 6 months.

But last week, my laptop crashed to a sky blue BSOD while gaming. Since then, I have been unable to completely recover my Laptop.


I have tried many many times. The hardware diagnostics is clean and everything passes.

Clean installation of windows goes fine, but the moment I get to NVIDIA driver, whole laptop just freezes or goes to black screen. And on hard reset, it does not boot up. I have to boot into Recovery->Troubleshooting and do System Restore to get the Laptop up and running.


I have tried all multiple ways of installing NVIDIA Driver - Dell provided drivers, from GeForce Experience and using Windows Update as well. All the times, my laptop freezes/goes black halfway through installation and I have to repeat the above hard reset, system restore to use the laptop.


I also opened dxdiag, and checked the Display tab. It says: "There is a problem with Microsoft Basic Display Adapter device. For more information, search for 'graphics device driver error code 31"


Any ideas ?

:)

 

nvidia geforce 341.02 driver causes black screen


I am also having the same problem, ie. black screen. I am using an alienware M11x laptop and Geforce nvidia 342.01 driver. (Until now I couldnt find a solution)For the past 1 month, I have been looking for a solution in the internet and havent found one, although there are varieties of solutions have been offered and I have tried all those solutions, but none works on my laptop. Most of them suggest to reboot to safe mode, and after that use DDU to uninstall and clean all Nvidia driver related files in the system, and perform a custom install of the driver (Perform Clean Install). I have done that and once it is finished installing the driver, it reboots and there it goes again, BLACK SCREEN. Now I am using the standard Intel HD driver, very standard one.Appreciate any info to solve this. Thanks.

 

nvidia geforce 341.02 driver causes black screen


I followed your tip of uninstalling the existing driver before installing the new one, and it works! No black screens and no need to force restart the PC.

These are the steps i took:
- Uninstalled the existing driver via Device Manager, restarted.
After the reboot, Windows will immediately attempt to reinstall it, so i opened the task manager, and killed the "Driver Installation Module" process.

- Installed the driver downloaded from nvidia, and voilá, currently running 365.19, no issues so far.

 

NVIDIA driver causes black screen and PC freeze (only in-game)

I downloaded Fortnite 2 months ago. I've had freezing problems with it ever since then

It's way more stable if I play it at 60fps, but even then it crashes. 120fps is just unplayable as it always freezes. However, my machine runs the game perfectly.

I've tried everything - did a clean re-install of the GPU driver, reinstalled Windows 10, installed motherboard drivers, changed settings in the NVIDIA control panel 3D section. I probably did a lot more but I can't remember it all.

Recently, I tried installing an old NVIDIA game driver, because I read up somewhere that the new drivers can cause the freeze. So I downloaded the 381.78 driver and installed it right after a clean OS install - it still crashed.

I contacted Epic Games about the problem and they said the GPU is causing the problem, that it's a known issue, and they are working with NVIDIA on it.

Piriform Speccy results

Graphics card info: