'Update your Video Card Driver from the Card maker's Site'

[Trevor.Dennis]

We dearly miss Chris Cox and all those responses he made along the lines of  'Update your Video Card Driver from the Card maker's Site'.  If we all had a dollar for each time he said it...   Well, we'd have a shipload of dollars.  Of course the regular posters to this forums don't need telling that, or least ways they shouldn't need telling.  In my case it was my not often used laptop where I fell foul of good computer housekeeping after failing to install ShetchUp. 

The auto response to the error message told me that this error was most commonly associated with out of date video card drivers, which I knew couldn't apply to me because I have everything set to automatic update.  But I did a manual check anyway, and both the HD4000 and GTX680M had updates available, and SketchUp fired straight up right after installing them.  So I didn't feel so clever after that.  Especially with the WannaCry ransomware problem last week.

Incidentally, SketchUp Make is free and such a cool .3D drafting app.  The Pro version has to be paid for, but I think you do most of the drawing with Make.

[Chuck Uebele]

Yea, I heard that a few times from Chris. However, I had an switchable card once, and while it was listed as an AMD card, and they had updates for their version of that model, it was an HP computer, that required an update through HP. HP never updated the drivers, even though AMD did. Never do that again! I always make sure I get a separate, non-integrated, non-switchable card.

[John T Smith]

The last time I bought instead of building my own, it was an Alienware Pentium 2 that came bundled with Premiere 6 (the OLD version 6, not CS6) and I found out then that the newest driver was not always the best driver

I don't remember the model, but it came with an NVidia card that would only work with Pr6 using one specific driver... when I updated, thinking NVidia put out a newer driver for a reason, Pr6 stopped working and I had to go back to the driver that came with the computer

Isn't technology wonderful?

[Trevor.Dennis]

The laptop in question is a few years old now (as it would be with the GTS6**M family of cards) and an MSI GT70 (I think) with two SSDs in a raid0 for the system drive, and a HDD for data.  I have most of the CC apps on it, and they run smoothly, and it never previously even occurred to me to check the video drivers.  I really did think I had it set to auto.

I did try to put Windows 10 on it before the deadline last year, and the update failed.  I wonder if that was due to the drivers?  I have Win 10 on my Desktop and Cintiq Companion 2, and have grown to like it — most of the time.  I've had some audio issues that I never managed to resolve.  I'm pretty sure it was a post by John in the Prem Pro forum that convinced me to move to Win10.

As for locked in hardware like HP and Compaq (IBM is ringing a distant bell in my head regards locked in hardware) like Chuck says, steer well clear.