Display driver stopped responding and has recovered

Firstly, allow me to post the specifications of my laptop:

P-7805g Notebook Gateway FX
Windows 7 Premium 64-bit
Intel Core 2 Duo processor P8700 2.53Ghz
4 GB DDR3 RAM
Nvidia GeForce 9800M GTS with 1 GB of DDR 3 discrete video memory
Driver version 8.15.11.8852
Last updated on 28th July 2009.

OK, I have been having this problem since purchasing a Gateway Laptop on July 2009. Please allow me to give you a brief history about this.

When I purchased the laptop, it came with Windows Vista Premium 64 bit preinstalled. But the problem is, whenever I open Windows Media Player, there is an error message which says Display Nvidia Windows kernal driver version 186.52 has stopped responding and has successfully recovered.

Then, when I did a clean reinstall of Windows 7 Premium 64 bit on November 2009, the same problem appeared. I had no choice but to use VLC media player to watch DVDs. Thus, I ignored this problem for the time being because whenever I played games like Football Manager 2010 or Sims 3, the problem did not appear.

But the last straw came when I updated my Adobe Flash to version 10.1 and tried to watch Youtube videos. The videos will play for about 10 seconds and then suddenly, the video will stop, turn green and the same message with regards to the Display driver pops out. To solve this issue, I had to untick Enable hardware acceleration on the settings of the Flash Player by right clicking the video. This problem did not arise when I used an older version of Flash which was 10.0.

I tried to update, reinstall my video drivers but it seems that this mobile driver version is the latest and also reinstalling the drivers did not solve these issues.

Please help! I am a newbie when it comes to computers and I really want to solve this problem!

Hello,

Here is a more up to date driver for your card.
NVIDIA DRIVERS 257.21 WHQL

Well, this is what I did:

I downloaded and installed this driver immediately. But I did not remove the previous version of the driver first. Is this the correct procedure?

But watching videos on Youtube has a slight problem. When I click on enable video accelerator, the same message appears but this time it is display Nvidia Windows kernel mode driver version 257.21 has stooped responding and has successfully recovered.

Is this issue got to do with the latest Adobe Flash player which is 10.1?

Please help! I am a newbie here!

So should I just remove ALL my display drivers first by going to device manager and on NVIDIA GeForce 9800M GTS properties, click "To uninstall the driver (Advanced)" then, click driver software for this device and then reinstall the newest driver version?

This is the first time I am doing this so please bear with me as I am a newbie here! I just don't want to mess up anything! Thanks for your kind and swift response by the way!

Also, after you do what Rich suggested,

Uninstall flash player. Then try reinstalling it.

OK, should I also uninstall the video drivers and then reinstall the newer video drivers? Then only reinstall flash player?

Thanks!

Yes... Uninstall the old drivers...reboot.

Install new drivers.

Then uninstall flash player, then reinstall.


Don't be scared... You're learning

Well, I uninstalled the drivers, restarted my PC but Windows automatically downloaded the earlier drivers which is version 8.15.11.8852. So should I uninstall these drivers, restart again and when Windows try to download these drivers, block this process?