Cannot install nVidia drivers on GeForce 6600 GT

Rohan

I'm having a bit of trouble with a graphics card, and I was hoping that someone here might be able to help. My brother's system is a little old, but still runs most games today with no problems. It's a socket 754 Athlon 3000+ with 2GB PC2700 DDR and a Radeon X800 GTO. He mostly uses it when we get together to have a lan. Probably the game that gets the most playtime is Call of Duty 4, and so when World at War was released, we were looking forward to some coop goodness. Except, Treyarch must be staffed by retards because they took Infinity Ward's CoD4 engine, and for their game made it incompatible with cards with anything lower than Pixel Shader 3.0. So, we had to swap out the X800 for my flat-mate's old GeForce 6600 GT, a slightly slower card, but it has Pixel Shader 3.0.

The problem is, the nVidia driver will not install. We've downloaded the latest 181.22 and every time the install seems to go okay, but then after the restart, the resolution is down to the most basic, and Device Manager reports that there is a problem with the card. Reverting to the nVidia driver from Windows Update does work (he has Vista Home Premium 32-bit), but I would prefer to have nVidia's control panel available. There is no problem with the card at all, it always worked in it's old pc (which had the exact same specs), it's just that the nVidia driver refuses to install. My flat-mate said he always downloaded the drivers from nVidia's site, not the card manufacturer's, but that's where I am at the moment, trying to find out who made the card, as he can't remember. I'm pretty sure it's a GigaByte card, as it has a blue pcb, but who knows... I tried looking at GigaByte's 6600 GT models and couldn't find a similar board on their site. I took some photographs, and hope that someone here will recognise it -

tsmvengy

Judging by the model number on that sticker it's an XFX card. Also what is the version number on the driver you get from Windows Update?

XFX has drivers on their website (www.xfxforce.com) but you have to register to get into support so I'm not going to delve further into that.

Rohan

Damn, I completely forgot about checking that number over the 'net. The driver Windows gives over update is from 2nd of October, and I don't even see that model GeForce on XFX's site. I've just checked CoD4 and World at War - CoD4 runs fine but some objects, say for example the blown-up cars in the Winter Crash level, are just black textures. World at War runs barely at 800*600 with all the settings set to minimum... hardly an ideal situation.

I'm sure that things could be improved with a driver update, but every time I install the latest nVidia driver straight from their site, Windows reports an error with the card after reset and there's no sign that the nVidia software has been installed anywhere.