Display driver frustration

I use an older (4.5 years old) Dell Precision M4400 laptop running Windows 7 64-bit at work, and while it is certainly getting a bit long in the tooth, it has worked well for me. My demands are relatively light - I use most of the 8GB of RAM it has for web applications and browsing, and a few other applications. I don't put the graphics processor to the test much, aside from having a second Dell display connected via DisplayPort. Both displays were operating just fine at 1920X1200.

As time has gone on, however, the newer drivers for my graphics chipset have started causing a very annoying issue. Power saving behavior incorporated into the driver (called "Powermizer") is not compatible with the firmware Dell has made available for my laptop. As a result, if a fairly current version of the nVidia Quadro FX 770M graphics driver is installed, the laptop will blue screen (with a STOP 0x00000116 error). Safe mode worked to prevent this from happening, but prevents use of a number of system items. Simply removing the driver was insufficient - Windows 7 would install the "current" driver from Windows Update, and the blue screen would happen on the next normal reboot.

Solution: I uninstalled all nVidia driver components (in Control Panel) and installed only the following parts of the driver package:
nVidia Graphics Driver 275.33
nVidia nView 135.85

I also downloaded a piece of freeware called Powermizer Switch which (via registry settings) disables the Powermizer feature that causes the blue screen. I downloaded it from here.

Where before, the system would blue screen on login or would simply say "Unable to save Display Settings" when I would attempt to enable the external display - now it works just fine, as it has for 4.5 years.

Conclusion: If you are happy with how something works, resist making changes, applying updates, etc. You never know what might break, and further, you don't know if your "update" will be reversible!