Vista - Can lack of drivers cause shut down

I have two hard drives one is loaded with XP Pro, the other has a brand new install of Vista Ultimate 64. I have been using the system for months with XP without incident. When I boot to Vista the system will just shut down at different times. I have used the pc as long as 15-30 minutes before it happens. Brief history:

I was near the end of the Vista installation where you create a user the first time the system shut down. I rebooted, the system brought me back to the same point in the installation and finished. I was setting up my desktop and display resolution when the system shut down again. I then rebooted back to XP so I could download Vista 64 bit video drivers since the Netgear wireless adapter I have will not be supported for Vista I was in the middle of installing the video driver, which is not windows certified but is the driver that EVGA states is for Vista 64, when it shut down again. Once again I rebooted and when I went to re-install the driver it took me to the point in the installation where it had failed and finished. Not long after I finished installing the video driver the system shut down again.

Can this problem be caused by lack of or bad drivers?

AMD 6400+ BE
ECS GeForce 6100MS-M
2 Gig Kingston Hyper X 6400
EVGA 8800 GTS 512 Meg
WD 500 Gig HD
Segate 320 Gig HD
Pioneer 20X DVD/CD Burner
Cool Master 550 Watt PS

since there is only one eVGA product listed, and since it looks similar to my card (I have the eVGA 8800 GTS 512MB KO edition) I noticed that on the eVGA site the recommended driver is a 169.XX, whereas I am using the 175.16 (latest) driver from the nVidia site with much better results - the 169 driver made my games choppy, which they should not have been because they were almost chopless on an x1650 Pro 512 MB card in another system - with a much slower CPU and RAM - so I knew something was not right. I went searching, and although initially the 175.16 made no mention of supporting the 8800 GTS (when it was Beta) when it was released as a final driver it shows that it *definitely* supports the entire 8800 line. Upgrade to that driver and see if it makes a difference.

Also, I recommend you grab the eVGA Precision utility - EVGA | EVGA Precision - their own little branded version of what seems to basically be a toned down version of RivaTuner - it allows you to set all sorts of settings, including the fan (mine defaults to running at about 37% in automatic mode, and I have yet to see it actually increase when gaming, but temps have hit close to 80 C on it - I am much more prudent, and manually set the fan to 75% - it keeps the GPU at about 46 C when basically idle and around 55 when playing The Witcher / Assassin's Creed, much cooler than the automatic setting.

Once I figure out RivaTuner and how to set the settings on the card manually so I can have the fan increase speeds automatically without having to load software on every boot, I am going that route - but for now, I am using the eVGA Precision utility. You need to be a registered with eVGA to download the utility (not a problem for me since I registered so I could register my GA and mobo with them).

Thanks for the input esp for reminding me about the Precision utility. I had it loaded in XP but not Vista.The EVGA site has the 175.16 driver you mention and was the driver I had installed last night. The video driver had no affect on shutting down. This morning I booted to Vista and it shut down in less than one minute after posting. So I am back on XP. I am thinking about upgrading my motherboard since I want to use 8 gig of memory and this board only has 2 slots.

I flashed the BIOS and the shut down issue has quit. Thanks for the reply John.

Glad you got it figured out, and you're welcome about the reminder of the Precision utility, and thanks *you* for posting back with the answer.