Use Adobe & nVidia? Best Read This…

I’m putting on my public service hat for this post. Just recently I have been doing some work for a local photographer involving Photoshop CS4 which has been an interesting departure from my usual round of Server/Office/Exchange type clients.

The problems arose when the brand new Dell XPS desktop PC I installed for her started to misbehave when she tried to print from Photoshop.  The nVidia graphics driver would crash when she tried to preview her file using the Epson drivers for her A3 printer.  An error message would pop up saying the nVidia driver had crashed and was restarting.  This would eventually result in Photoshop locking completely.

I tested on a couple of my systems here and got exactly the same problem.  The key factor was each machine was running the 64bit version of Windows 7 with the latest nVidia drivers.  That’s the latest WHQL certified drivers, which were dated back in January.

It turns out there is a problem with this driver that caused precisely this issue to occur.  I was able to rectify the problem yesterday afternoon by installing nVidia’s latest beta drivers which resulted in a very happy photographer.
But checking their site today, nVidia have released a new version of their drivers which are stamped as version 197.13 (snappy).

So if you fall into this subset of users, be sure to update.