Nvidia 196.21 driver issue in windows 7

Hello there, I have a Nvidia GTX260 graphic card connected to the desktop computer which is installed with Windows 7. The computer was working fine but recently after updating the graphic drivers to Nvidia 196.21, the computer crashes frequently. The performance of the computer has really become slow and I am not able to play any games on the computer. When any of the game is started, it results in the game crashing. I cant figure out what is the problem and hence if anybody else is facing Nvidia 196.21 driver issue in windows 7 then please share some information which might help me in solving the issue. Thanks in advance.

Check if there are any applications which are running in background. Some applications have faulty coding due to which they tend to take up lot of memory space of the system memory. If such an application is installed on the computer, the application will take up lot of memory space. Therefore go to task manager and open the processes tab. Check for all the processes which are running. Terminate the processes which are unwanted and taking up lot of memory. After terminating such processes, check the performance of the computer.

Before doing any other troubleshooting I would suggest you to check if the games which you are trying to play are installed and working properly or not. The applications which are installed on the computer have lot of files associated to it. If any of the files which is associated to the application is corrupt or is missing on the system, then the application will not work. Try and replace the files which are corrupt or missing on the system and then see if the game works properly or not. If the game still does not work properly then you will have to reinstall the entire game to solve the problem.

I was also facing the same problems after updating the graphic drivers on the computer.I have the same Nvidia GTX series graphic card and to improve the performance of the graphic card, I updated the graphic driver of the computer. After updating the drivers, instead of performance improving the computer started crashing frequently. I suppose that the driver update which is available is not compatible with Windows 7 operating system and hence we are facing such problems. I uninstalled the updated drivers and then used the cards with default drivers which brought my computer back to working state.

The driver update which is available for the graphic card has many problems with it. It causes the GPU to heat beyond the threshold level due to which the GPU stops responding and hence the system crashes. The driver update which is suitable for the graphic card which you are using is Nvidia 195.62 driver update. Try to roll back the newly installed drivers and then install the driver update which is mentioned above. Once the correct driver update is installed, the graphic card will work normally under threshold temperatures without giving any problems.