My Nvidia 364.47 Experience: Helldrivers

I greet you all, Destructoidians. You don't know me, I provisionally know some of you whom I have stalked over my months of lurking, and many of you definitely know of the debacle, fracas, and general mayhem caused by today's topic of ranting: Nvidia's latest Devil Drivers From Hell: 364.47

My harrowing tale starts early this morning, 00:30, or 12:30 am, if you want to get Imperial. I am just about to begin the evenings ablutions in preparation for bed, when GeForce Experience merrily informs me a new Driver is ready for my GPU. 

'Splendid', I think, and send it on its merry updating ways, as I enter the washroom. When I return a few moments later, all Hell has broken loose in a fashion I haven't seen since Windows Vista had sex with a Nokia in a bush and gave us the Lumia Phone a horrifying few years afterwards.

Fire! Fire!

Sleep had to wait. A number of reboots later and I have confirmed the issue isn't going to go away. I go deeper. Safe Mode, wipe the driver out, restore what I can. Reboot again.

No BSOD. But a perfectly black void, apart from one lonely mouse cursor post-boot. No welcoming Windows 10 picture of a random pleasing Vista, only inky blackness and an arrow without anything to point at. Back to the boot options.

Repair options consulted - a "Keep My Files" reset option attempted. All that is gained 15 minutes later is a slew of interesting curses I come up with on the fly. Back to the boot, initiate a full "Remove everything" nuke. Thankfully I run a rather clean ship, and nothing on my drives is reliant on them alone - all can be recreated from clouds of one sort of another. I hit the Big Blue Button and go to bed. The hour is now around 2 am.

Eventually I wake up, bothered by lousy worried sleep and the call of nature. 7:30 am. I check up on the computer.

Windows has indeed reset overnight - but apparently that hasn't solved a thing. The same black screen of utter uselessness and seeming contempt for my sanity mocks me. In frustration I hammer in the password for my account, just to see if anything will happen. Surprise, it does!

By giving me a view of my Desktop without explorer.exe running.

At this point I basically say "Fuck everything about this" and bring out the Big Gun.

You will Boot or by Gaben my Win10 Sword will MAKE you boot!

Format everything. Nuke every single drive, back to scratch. Fresh install. 

It finally works. Set about reinstalling stable drivers. Get Battle.net and Steam back online, redownload my games. Everything seems good around 11 am. I leave for work, which starts at 12.

Finally, I come home shortly before 9 pm. Experimentally try the games I installed, see that everything is ship-shape. Count my blessings that I got of relatively lightly, when other Nvidia users who ran into the same issue ended up with bricked GPU's. 

Finally, I settle down to relax and just let my brain do some autopiloting. Level my latest Hunter up in Dreanor. A friendly Engineer hollers about an active Blingtron  5000 outside the Garrison. I thank him or her and go check it out.

Motherfucker gives me THIS.

If there is a Gamer God, he's surely pissing on me.

- Never pre-order! Unless if I'm at work, then you should definitely pre-order!

LOOK WHO CAME:

Zetakh   

lokhe   1