Vista - Anyone else notice this going on? (Applies to Dell and Intel).

I searched for a new driver version for my Mobile Intel® GM965 Express Chipset Family and found that they did in fact have a new version for it listed: 7.15.10.1608. When I searched to see if I had the latest driver version with their tool, it informed me afterwards that “Customized computer manufacturer driver detected. Please contact the computer manufacturer for possible updates”. So I did, I looked for it in Dell’s “Drivers and Downloads” section with the service tag option... and found that they still only had the previous version available for my system: 7.14.10.1409.

Should I be concerned with this? I have been having trouble with playing games for a while now, they keep crashing out at every available interval and I think this might be the main reason why (that is actually the reason I decided to check for a new driver version in the first place, having gone through this little headache before on my Dell XP desktop). Reckon it’s safe to install the other one anyway? It’s for the same device, and same operating system, it’s just not been screwed with or endorsed by Dell...

I really don't know why they've all of a sudden decided to give us the runaround with drivers (a few years back you could still get them straight from the hardware manufacturer instead), nor do I particularly care, but making us wait for months after the component driver has already been released for non-Dell users while they pussyfoot around with it is not cool. So, anyone know of a way that I can pester them to "get on it and get it done", as it were? I really just want to be able to play games on my laptop, uninterrupted and with no hiccups due to an old driver. I really rather don't think that's asking too much.


Thanks in advance for any help or advice!

Hi again EvilOzzness, I don't know exactly why but I guess the newer driver is for newer peripheral which happened to also covers the older models like yours. Thus the manufacturers might not want to fix anything that is not broken so they kept the older driver.

As an example based on my own experience, Nvidia 180.48 graphic driver seems working best for my setup and a few higher up ones gives me problems in SLi or in certain games. The newest one is 182.06; it may work for me better or not at all. I didn't bother to try.

Hope this makes sense to you.

Bruce

Possibly, but then I would expect that everything would still be running good if no update were necessary... and this thing is not, indicative of that I keep getting weird colors in my games sometimes, kind of hard to describe... it's like someone scribbled with multi-colored crayons on certain objects. My games worked for a while superbly when I first got this system without incident, and then it gradually came to the point where when I haven't even gotten half way through the loading screen, they crash out. No error messages, they will just freeze up and then close out. I'm pretty sure, having gone through this before with my other computer, it's due to a driver issue - that computer claimed everything was working fine, too and had no error message to report about it. I did some digging and found the updated driver, installed it and all was well again (this was back when they weren't having to be tweaked by Dell first, though - it came straight off of Intel's website).

Wouldn't the peripheral thing be under a new name if it was for a new type of thing though? I mean, like... an entirely new or improved chipset series would have some new characters in it, wouldn't it? I noticed the newest chipset for this laptop was now coming with Intel Graphics Media Accelerator X3100 instead of what we have... Hmm.

I guess I'll just have to wait and stalk that updates and downloads site to see if Dell finally releases a new one. Or to just try that one for the hell of it and see what happens. Can always uninstall it and reinstall the other one, eh?


Thanks again for your input Bruce, really appreciated!