1) my computer came with Intel HD Graphics 4400. source of this information: manufacturer's specifications.

2) When I open device manager and go to properties, it shows driver date: 8/11/2015 & driver version 10.18.15.4271

3) On Intel's website:
https://downloadcenter.intel.com/product/81497
The driver versions seem to start with a 15.40 and there are numbers after that. It seems like new drivers are regularly released.

Why does the driver version and driver date look so out of wack here?

i'm not sure i follow what you are asking

download the latest one

Have you actually downloaded and installed drivers previously? or have you just used the generic drivers that Windows provides?

I have not actually downloaded and installed drivers manually. It's possible that HP support assistant installed some.

Edit: I don't think the HP Support assistant installed any video drivers, since I installed Windows 10. I see that it installed a USB card reader driver and rapid storage technology. Those were both installed on 7/20/2016.

Just seemed strange to me that it's jumping from version 10 to version 15.

Also, I have googled around but I am not clear on how to update drivers. What are the steps for Windows 10? (1) download the new ones, then what?

go to the link where the driver is and click download, when downloaded double click it and it should autorun


u can also open device manager and right click the driver - update - search automatically

sometimes tho (a lot of times) windows will say u already have latest one
try this first then try above way.

Thanks for responses so far.

I was also concerned about downloading and installing the drivers because the Intel Driver update utility doesn't find any updates (and I see that it is searching for video drivers, too). After the scan, it talks about Intel generic drivers & how they may be different from the ones that the manufacturer offers.

I am experiencing some problems on my computer. Not to go off on a tangent but this might be related. Here are the 3 things:
-Video was crashing. Computer would kind of freeze up for a few seconds, and some open windows would turn black, and then it would recover, and tell me that the video drivers had crashed. This would mostly happen when I had a lot of stuff running at once (I have a bad habit of, by end of the day, having like 2 dozen Google Chrome Windows opened). Someone, after looking at some kind of windows log file, was telling me that what he thinks was causing this was (1) having multiple backup/cloud services running ie. Zoolz, One Drive, Google Drive (basically too many things trying to update/ sync), antivirus software; (2) also, said I should update drivers & software, mainly the ones that "interface" over the net. By following step 1, this problem is mostly fixed, but I still get the message "the display drivers have crashed and have now recovered" occasional.
-Pretty regularly, when I am shutting down the computer, I get a message that a program is running and preventing shut down. I am not sure which program this is. The name is a whole bunch of letters and numbers surrounded by { }. Sometimes windows seems to force close the program and sometimes I just cancel and just keep my computer on and then try to shut down a little later.
-Last night when I was shutting down I got a message saying something like "memory_management error" and windows now has to shut down (my computer was already in the process of shutting down, though).

Should I start by installing the video drivers or what should I do?

i would start by downloading the driver

are u getting a blue screen?


also what is ur machine model etc and what specs does it have

No, I am not getting a blue screen

Computer:
HP Pavilion 500-336
Motherboard Memphis-S
Intel Core i3 4130
4 GB PC3-12800 MB/s DDR3-1600
Intel HD Graphics 4400
Integrated IDT 92HD65C Audio 5.1 channel
Wireless LAN 802.11b/g/n featuring Single-band (2.4Ghz) 1x1
Realtek RTL8151GH-CG 10/100/1000 Mb/s
SuperMulti DVD Burner drive
7-in-1 multimedia card reader
Internal 300W (100V-240V)
Front ports:
USB 3.0: 2
Headphone: 1
Microphone: 1
Back ports:
1. USB 2.0: 2
2. USB 2.0: 2
3. LAN (Ethernet)
4. VGA
5. DVI-D
6. USB 3.0: 2
7. Audio: Line-in
8. Audio: Line-out
9. Audio: Microphone

yes go ahead and update driver to latest one.

id also recommend another stick of RAM theyre only like 20$ or so.

ur machine can take up 16GB it would be money well invested.

I suggest not to update drivers right away. Latest drivers might not be compatible with the hardware embedded on your unit, say the trackpad. This happened to me before when I got too excited getting the latest updates. As a result, the speakers and the trackpad did not functioned. This might also affect other programs installed on your unit. I have to download the backdated drivers to make them work again.

Basing decisions on anecdotal results is not a good place to start with diagnosis, also this is a tower if that wasn't clear, not a laptop with a trackpad just FYI.

OP: the hawsell i3 is not a ferrari but it can handle google drive, onedrive and Dropbox all running concurrently. I'm not familiar with the other one you mentioned. I would rule out malware before assuming this is a driver issue, and I would check for any software installed unintentionally related to updating drivers, you can cross reference them for information at shouldiremoveit.com

Windows 10 intel drivers come through windows update now automatically, so there may be something wrong with a recent update as a possibility. You can always get an inexpensive graphics card (don't go crazy since you have a 300w psu) and that would take load off the processor/ram and improve performance while bypassing any intel driver issues

Yes, I am more doubtful that there are even any updated drivers available. I tried a few of them on the intel website but I think it comes down to a lot of trial and error to see if any of them are appropriate. I probably just misinterpreted search results on the Intel website.

I had Malware bytes on "auto protect" mode and I am going to try turning that off, as I am wary of "security" software causing issues. I will see if that improves the situation at all.

Recently, I have run into a couple of odd things happening. One time my computer would not shut down (it just hung on the shut down screen for hours and hours).
Another time, when I was booting up the computer, it said, "scanning and repairing drive C."

Two relatively inexpensive things you can do which might help:

1) get a cheap but not ancient graphics card, this will have a driver from nvidia or amd and graphics will have its own dedicated memory

2) get an ssd to replace your main drive, many brands come with copying software so you don't have to reinstall software. Make sure you get an appropriate capacity based on your usage. Crucial mx300 has some great pricing and comes with acronis, Samsung comes with magician. Before you clone, manually run chkdsk /r from an admin command prompt because of your history you mentioned.

This may not fix your problem but both items can be reused if you end up with worst case scenario like a main board or undiagnosed problem and have to replace the machine.

Driver booster can also install wrong unsupported graphic drivers.But in global it helps a lot finding drivers for other components.

Thanks for the advice. I will hunt around for a video card. I have to figure out what specs will be needed for my computer.

I do have an SSD drive that I was going to install in my Mac. But then I was kicking around some different alternatives and while procrastinating I used the drive for Time Machine, which is a backup program for Macs. I basically need some of that backup data and so I am going to have to work on copying that data over to another drive and then I can install that on my Windows computer.

If I do regular backups of the data on my windows computer, am I running much of a risk of data loss? In other words, when there is a hard drive problem, does the hard drive just fail totally (in which case you can hop to the latest backup) or is data getting corrupted without you knowing and then you have to spend a lot of time and also hope that you have the right backup.

I don't think I used Drive booster. Unless that's somehow built into iObit uninstaller.

I forgot to mention before, I have also been getting errors in Chrome that say, "Rats! WebGL hit a snag," and that gives an option to ignore or reload.
I found a potential solution that addresses this and "display driver stopped responding and has recovered" (this was the error message that initiated this thread).
Here is the fix:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VJgebUumBXY

Time will tell if that solves the problem.

Ok, I have some questions about doing the hardware upgrade.

For buying a new video card, I see that my computer has 5 expansion slots. Could that be right? Seems like a lot given that this was a $500 MSRP computer 3 years ago. Here is a list of the supposed expansion slots:
1 PCI Express x16 (Gen 3.0)
3 PCI Express x1 (Gen 2.0)
1 PCI Express half-length mini card x1

My power supply is 300W. How do I add up current hardware & proposed new video card to make sure that I stay within the 300W? Do I just check the power usage for each of my computer components? Hard drive, DVD drive, processor, fans (anything else), and add that to the power usage of the proposed video card?

For the video card, I would want one that supports dual monitor. Right now, I have a monitor that I bought in 2009 that has dvi-d and vga. But, that monitor can't be vesa mounted so I will have to replace it. But, for the time being I will be using that monitor. Eventually, I will want dual vesa mounted monitors. So, I probably need something with dual HDMI and 1 DVI-D now.

The SSD that I have right now is SDSSDA-480G-G25. So, that's Satta revision 3.0. (6Gbits/s). It's a very small drive (laptop sized). I do see that the hard drive in my computer is a SATA drive. So, I should be good, right, or are there multiple types of sata drives?

You can use disk utility to do a restore onto another external drive and then tell time machine settings under system preferences to remove the ssd as the backup target and add the new external, be aware that if your ssd was formatted to hfs+ you might have to use a tool like gparted to create a new partition table or you'll always have a small efi mac partition at the beginning of the drive (you can use diskpart in windows too)

I've seen hard drives run for quite a while in pre-failure but have strange symptoms.

Here's my two cents on iobit software, I consider it all junkware and that may be the root of your problem. I've never seen it improve a system's performance and nearly always after being removed the system gets better. I'd get revo uninstaller, the free edition, and remove anything iobit related then run an updated malwarebytes and adwcleaner to clean up the rest.

After that go into chrome settings and if it says chrome has been corrupted choose the reset option and when that's done go to "about" and make sure it says up to date. After that look up how to run system file check from a command prompt, run check disk like I mentioned earlier in the thread and if you don't have cloning software that came with the ssd, look at getting Acronis which will copy larger disks to smaller ones or I'm sure someone might have a suggestion on a free cloning software, clonezilla is free but I don't think it will shrink to ssd size on the fly.

If your windows hard drive does fail as long as your backup is not corrupt you should have at least your data, but unless it is doing an image copy it won't have your software like time machine would

There are websites to enter your hardware information to check your peak power draw and a certified Evga 430w psu is under $30 on amazon last I checked. Cheap 740gt or similar video cards don't take a lot of power and you can typically find them with three outs like dvi hdmi and vga to dual monitor, you may need an adapter for dual hdmi but id just get one monitor with a dvi port instead. Yes that Sata connection will work

Last note, if mbam and adwcleaner find a lot of trouble you may want to read the stickies and create a thread to help remove malware which gabe or some of the benevolent helpers here to assist you with

Haven't copied this size of data in a long time over USB 2.0. Takes time :^/

As far as replacing IOBit, thanks for suggestion. So you are saying that I should first install Revo and then uninstall iObit, and therefore Revo might be able to help in getting rid of iobit?

Also, what's the basic procedure with Revo? Do you run it when you want to uninstall something? Or would you first use the manufacturer's uninstall program?

I also have this program glary utilities. At a glance, has 4.5 stars on download.com based on several thousand user reviews. I can't remember why I installed it, or if I did consciously install it. Are you familiar with it and does it fall into the same category as iObit?

Will I likely be able to install the SSD drive even before I have the proper brackets or modification hardware? Might I need some sort of extender cables so that the cords could reach? Or is there some other way to temporarily rig it?

I am starting to think that your theory of my hard driving having problems may be correct. I just put a couple of photos on my desktop and then decided to delete them. After telling the computer to move the 2 photos to the recycle bin, I get a message "preparing to recycle from (directory name). Discovering 0 items." So seems like it was having some problems in moving those files or reading the files, or whatever it has to do. Although I didn't have problems opening up those files shortly before.

Here is a seemingly good price on a graphics card. Although I really do want something with 2 HDMI ports. Another motivation behind getting something with HDMI is that I have cable TV but I don't have a cable box and I believe there is some way to use your computer as a cable box (with additional hardware). I do understand that there are HDMI splitters but (1) those cost something; (2) wouldn't those perform a little worse?

My main concern in buying a video card is that I don't need any kind of high performance specifications (and the electricity cost to power such devices). Right now, I basically watch you Tube, or sometimes open 3 or 4 photos at once. Will be using dual 23 inch monitors probably starting in a few months, if not sooner. Nothing else really. And then there is the plan of running video to a 32 inch TV but that's probably not for another year down the road or more.