Windows 7 - GTX 550 Ti driver crash

A while ago I had purchased an EVGA GTX 260. It was giving me some problems so I sent it back and got another one. It was working fine until one day, it gave me the same problems as the other one did. So I recently purchased an EVGA GTX 550 Ti.

My problem is the drivers sometimes randomly crash. Sometimes I get a black screen for a few seconds and it comes up with "Drivers have recovered" or something like that. Other times (most of the time) the screen goes black and I have to turn my computer off and back on. It never happens when I'm playing a game though, it's usually when I'm just browsing Facebook or other sites.

I've read that Nvidia driver version 285.62 causes this. I uninstalled it, and installed 280.26. I'm still having the problem. I'm also read that once you install 285.62 you'll always have this problem, no matter what version you install afterwards.

How do I fix it?

well you can download and install driver sweep and then reboot into safe mode, run driver sweep and remove all Nvidia drivers, this will remove all traces of them.

Looks like we have the exact same graphics card, except I do not have any issues with mine.

Have you tried rolling back the driver before going with the installation of 280.26, rather than an uninstall?
Have you done a clean installation when you installed the 280.26 driver?

Usually it is better to do a clean installation of the driver if the previous driver had issues.

Didn't think about the driver sweep though, might be worth a shot.

I did this after I uninstalled the 285.62. Then I installed the previous version. The problem still continues.

I have not tried rolling back. I'll try it but I doubt it will solve anything.

Yes I have done a clean installation. I guess I could just format my hard drive and install a really old driver version. Or just buy a Radeon HD 6870.

Rolling back the driver now will probably not solve the issue as it won't roll it back to the good driver.

Not something I usually suggest, but I think the 290.53 beta driver might be worth a shot to see if it stops the crashes. I have a friend currently running it, and it's quite stable for a beta.

I've tried those drivers as well. Not sure why but it still gave me problems.

I wouldn't go about reinstalling Windows just yet.

Can you try uninstalling the driver, running a registry clean with CCleaner, and then reinstalling the 280.26 driver, and see if it works, seeing as the registry keys of the driver will be completely gone. Remember to keep a backup of the registry when you run the registry cleaning tool.

Just tried this. It was running good for a while, but in the end the problem still happens.

Is a Radeon HD 6870 better or worse than what I have right now?

I think it's a stronger card than the GTX550, but why would you pay and get another card when you can solve the issue without buying anything, and worst case senario - reinstall windows.

I remembered having the same issue, a long while ago, with the same driver. Reinstalling the driver with a clean install solved the issue for me though.

You could try a system restore to get back to before you had the crashing issue.

I've always had the crashing issue with the GTX 260 so I thought there was a problem with all of the GTX 260 cards. I thought buying a different card would help, but I was wrong.

I'm going to format my hard drive and try installing an older version of the drivers.