i had this same problem with my new Dell XPS One 24 (NVIDIA 9600M GT) that i wiped and installed Windows 7 x64 Ultimate on right after i got it. all i could get to work was the standard VGA adapter that wouldn't even support screen savers or windows media center. none of the drivers i downloaded from NVIDIA or dell would work, even after pointing to the specific INF file manually.
the main problem is that the NVIDIA drivers that you download from their site are designed for an attached graphics card, not an integrated one, at least that's what i've gathered from the research i've done. it seems that all the notebooks and mobile hybrid pc's these days that have integrated GPUs on the motherboards have specific hardware ID's for the cards that aren't recognized by the generic NVIDIA drivers.
here's what i did to solve the problem, it's risky but it worked.
1) Download the Dell video drivers specific to your machine, even though they obviously won't work. You need the INF file from Dell that has the device ID located in it.
2) Extract the dell drivers and find the device ID in the INF file. Just search for the string SUBSYS and that will locate it.
3) Download the 186.81 drivers setup file from nvidia and run it to extract the files.
4) Go to the ListDevices.txt file in the display directory and find the device ID under the NVDM.INF section. This part was a little tricky because my graphics card was listed in a bunch of different sections. I did a little research on the internet and came to the conclusion that NVDM.INF is for Dell Mobile cards which is what mine is.
5) Replace all instances of the device ID in NVDM.INF (there should be just 2 instances) with the device ID located in the INF file extracted from the Dell drivers. Mine was in the format DEV_XXXX&SUBSYS_YYYYYYYY and the only difference in the two ID's was the YYYYYYYY number.
6) Go through the process of updating the driver by browsing for it and searching for the driver software in the location of the NVDM.INF file you just edited.
7) Reboot the machine after it's done and pray that it comes back up without any problems.
the bottom line is that the NVIDIA drivers on NVIDIA's site are the right ones, but none of the INF files have the hardware specific PCI device ID's for your hardware and so Windows won't be able to recognize any of the drivers as being correct. what i did using the steps above was just add the device ID specific to my hardware to the INF file manually so Windows would recognize it and install it.
more information about PCI device ID's is located here:
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms791082.aspx
UPDATE:
after further research, it turns out that i needed to use the NVAM.INF file instead. i had a few problems using the NVDM.INF file. according to the documentation on PCI device ID' in the link above, the second 4 digits in the subsystem ID (SUBSYS_XXXXYYYY) corresponds to the vendor ID. this vendor ID is important. when i downloaded and extracted the device drivers from Dell's website for my machine, the subsystem ID from the NVDD.INF file in those drivers was 9013
1043. i searched for all instances of 1043 in the ListDevices.txt file and the only sections where my 9600M GT was listed was in the NVAM.INF section, which according to the web is for ASUS computers, not sure what the deal with that is. there were 4 different lines in that section for my video card, probably for different motherboard configurations. i had no idea which one to choose so i picked the first one, figuring if i had to i'd try each one till one worked. so, i edited the NVAM.INF file and replaced the subsystem ID of the line i picked with the one from dell's driver file. i then repeated the process of updating the drivers manually and now i am not experiencing any problems. hopefully this is it, but i'll have to wait and see.
before i did each of these driver installs i created a restore point just in case. obviously, this is extremely important.
, so second choice)> pick on a list of drivers on my computer(second choice again)> uncheck compatible hardware> then pick a driver. I picked a driver for 9600 gt not 9600m gt and it has been working good last couple of hours, ima have to try with heavy and soft games to check out this drivers...
thx tho ima just have to w8 untill final release comes out(as much as i don't like vista) i've tried 2 different builds of seven and no luck with them 7254 and 7100 64 and 32... its a shame it looked sooooooo nice and fast, even my cpu temp got a bit lower...
