Latest GeForce Driver 398.82 Bluescreens PC
Ouch! No sooner did I install the latest Nvidia GeForce driver — namely, 398.82 with an 8/1 release date — than my PC threw a bluescreen crash my way. The detail from Reliability Monitor appears below. This leaves me in something of a dilemma. Should I roll back to the previous version, or wait to see if it crashes again? Fortunately, I’ve got my 9AM backup to roll back to on my production PC. Thus, I’m in “wait and see” mode right now. But gosh! Finding myself in the situation of latest GeForce Driver 398.82 bluescreens PC is something I haven’t faced for at least a couple of years now.
This bluescreen crashed my PC hard enough I had to perform a hard reset to return to computing action. Sigh.
When Latest GeForce Driver 398.82 Bluescreens PC, What to Do?
Surprisingly, the crash was hard enough that the PC stuck on the bluescreen for several minutes. I decided to quit waiting, and did a hard reset to return to computing on that machine. So far, I’ve been running for about half an hour without a recurrence. The error message speaks of an “unknown function.” Presumably this was called in the latest Nvidia driver installer so I believe the error is unlikely to recur. That said, there is a mention of bluescreen when using Alt-Tab between a full-screen game and a video in the Netflix Edge Browser (something else that’s not likely to affect me, either). See this discussion at AnandTech for details: Nvidia releases 398.82 WHGL Game Ready Driver.
If, like me, you’re mildly obsessive about keeping drivers up-to-date, consider yourself warned that there’s at least some potential for trouble with the 398.82 release. My system is a pretty run-of-the-mill and hardly leading edge rig. A Z170 chipset, i7-6700 CPU, and a MSI GTX 1070 graphics card is not likely to suffer from bleeding-edge hardware gotchas. Methinks there’s a bug lurking in the Nvidia installer somewhere. Hopefully, they’ll root it out before the next update hits the Internet.
[PS Added 1 Hour later]: I just finished reported my replicable bug experience to Nvidia through their Nvidia Driver Feedback web page. I’ll be interested to see if this provokes any kind of response from them.