Uh kinda said it in the title.The latest pre-release NVIDIA driver causes Windows 7 to randomly freez.I was testing it out today, after having not "many" problems with Windows 7 (at least major problems). However, suddenly my entire computer froze for around a minute or so, and then returned back to normal. This occurred constantly after some interval of time.

One word: Pre-release. That translates into beta. Beta drivers from a vendor combined with a beta OS=possible bad experience. If you want to test out beta drivers, you needor at least shouldbest them on a production ready system.

I believe that the original poster is referring to the drivers(179.43, WDDM 1.1) that Windows Update currently serves up for the Windows 7 beta. These aren't random beta drivers. I don't know if they are compatible with any other OS.Did you get any error messages about the graphics drivers? I've had the odd bluescreen (Win7 X64, build 7000), but so far the 149.43 drivers are OK in my system. The prior version from Windows Update (149.23) seemed to be the most reliable ones I used. The Vista x64 drivers installed OK, but they all gave errors in some applications.

Hello,Sorry, I was just trying to inform people just in case, however it does not seem to be the issue; It just happened by coincidence.Before I installed the 179.43 NVIDIA driver, my Windows 7 was running fine. However, today, after I installed it - my computer will randomly "freez". Everything literally freezes (sometimes the sound doesn't). I thought it was the driver since it was the only thing I had installed, however now that I have uninstalled it (did a roll back on the driver + did a system restore) its still occuring.So, now I am not sure whats up and these freezes are getting annoying. Everything was going perfectly and now these freezes occur. I'm not sure why.I checked the Event Viewer -> System logs and a ton of this error is recorded:"A parity error was detected on \Device\RaidPort1." - been going on tfor the past 2 hours.Any one have any idea whats up? Is this error causing the freezes?I just had a freez when typing this message, however the sound was not affected at all, my music was playing normally.Any ideas? Thanks!

I figured out what was causing my freezes.It was explorer. Once I quit explorer, my freezes stopped.Any idea what might be causing explorer to freak out like this?

I've seen hard disk errors "freeze" previous versions of windows. If you are getting a parity error from your RAID set, time for a replacement drive.

If you happen to a parity error as a result of a disk IO and Explorer issued the IO, then Explorer will freeze until the IO operation was recovered or aborted.Don't know what you mean exactly with "Once I quit Explorer....", explorer cannot quit, it runs all the time, if you kill it, it will restart.

By quit explorer I meant I went into the Task Manager, found the process explorer.exe and ended the process. To start it back up, I have to manually do it, it doesn't happen automatically.Heres the thing, I do not have my hard drive in any raid config. I just have two different SATA HDDs hooked up, one with Vista installed and the other with Windows 7 Installed.I am now certian that this error "A parity error was detected on \Device\RaidPort1." is causing the issue because its being spammed in the Event Viewer, and the times corrospond with the freezes. Problem is, I'm really not that sure why this is happening or what could have caused this issue.Some info-Log Name: SystemSource: nvstorEvent ID: 5Level: ErrorEvent Data: \Device\RaidPort1 0F0018000100000000000000050004C0070000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000001010000050004C00000000000000000Mother Board: P5NT-DeluxeProcessor: Intel Core2Duo 3.0GHzGFX Card: NVIDIA 8800 GTI get around 11 errors in 1 minute, this repeats for around...well couple of hours/until I shutdown the computer?Mind you that I did not have any issues at all for the first week or so when I installed Windows 7. This has only started yesterday and from what I can recall the only Installation/change I made was installing the latest NVIDIA pre-release driver (display). I have not touched any HDD stuff.Any ideas? When I stop/quit explorer.exe (aka the task bar and etc) the problem seems to go away.Is my HDD faling (even though its a new one, then again thats possible)? If so how can I for sure tell?

http://www.hardforum.com/showthread.php?t=1357317The last reply to this thread describes the same problem as me. Any one know how to fix this?

Remove theNVIDIA driver from the computer and restore the system to the point before the problem exists. Windows 7 is a new operating system (only the beta version) and whole driverstore has been reprogrammed; some old driver is not compatible with new OS. I suggest that you should wait for another period of time till the retail version is released and push the vendor company to upgrade their device driver.

Hi AMailer Since your computer was running smoothly before the new driver installation that means it has nothing to do with explorer or hard disks. Did you install the Nvidia driver from within the administrator account? or installed as "run as administrator" from within user account? Thanks

Hello,When I had installed the NVIDIA driver, it was via the Windows Update (if it means anything, I did it from a 2nd admin account that I had made).In any case, I seem to have solved the issue by downloading this driver:Zhttp://downloads.guru3d.com/GeForce-Forceware-182.06-WHQL-Vista-32-bit-download-2187.htmlIts for Vista but it seems to be working flawlessly, I have not had any issues since the installation. I installed this driver by right-clicking Run-as Administrator.The issue with the mouse has not come back as well; But I haven't realyl done anything for that, so not sure exactly what happened.Thanks for the help, if this problem comes back I'll update this topic.P.S. In regards to my hard disk problem, that was a problem I had with my 750 GB HDD and I checked around, several other people experienced the same issue with large sized HDDs. What happened was, and this occured only a week, almost two weeks after installing Windows 7, everytime I did a read/write (open a folder, browse, install, aka use my computer) windows would freeze. When I checked the error logs, it repoted soemthing about /Device/Raid1Port failed or something along those lines (and no, I did not have any raid config setup).Anyhow, I brought that up becuase - during the first week (almost 2) or so, I had installed the NVIDIA Pre-release driver and it seemed to be working fine, but guess not!

i am running the nvidia 179.48 64bit drivers with windows 7 on an hp hdx-18 without any issues at all.but if they are the same drivers as you are using these drivers are listed as beta and if you are running nvidia beta drivers the issue may of course be down to incompatibility with your hardware/software and the new drivers, nothing at all to do with windows 7when you put two unpredictable items together it makes it much harder to ascertain where the issue is coming from