NVidia Beta Driver Corruption (Beta 295.51)

As if I hadn't had enough problems lately with my PC, mainly Skyrim, I was just browsing the Net (Bethsoft forums actually) and my screen went all shades of pink and froze.  At first I could move the cursor but not actually click on anything.  Naturally I thought "Oh hell, dead graphics card," but since rebooting and entering the details in Google I came up with this.

http://forums.nvidia.com/index.php?showtopic=222077&st=20

Co-incidentally, I had installed the latest beta drivers which are 295.51, the subject of the above forum page link so it seems it is a driver issue as it's happening to others using the same driver.  Hopefully, my card is safe.  I was starting to feel like someone had put a curse on me...lol.

There's a screen shot of exactly the same thing that happened to me on that page.  I had also been using Firefox which is my default browser and I also have had the freezing issues on Youtube as others on that page have had which I had at first thought may be Flash related.  Uninstalling Flash with their own uninstaller and then reinstalling seemed to fix it temporarily but the problems returned.  I even started avoiding Youtube for a few days in case it happened again, but it seems it's not their problem after all.

Interestingly, the NVidia Tech support guy denied that it could be the drivers, however when so many people report the same thing and revert to previous drivers and have the problem go away, I have to wonder about denial.

Usually I avoid beta software like the plague, especially device drivers, but considering the Skyrim problems I've been having I decided to try them.  Big mistake.

Anyway, now there are new Certified Drivers (295.73) released which I have since installed (cleanly.).  Remains to be seen if it happens again.  At least I can roll back to the last stable release as I keep them on backup.

Just a heads up in case anyone has the same issue and may read this.  My Skyrim issues happened before installing the beta drivers though so now I'm about to try and sort that mess out.

Disappearing DVD Burner or CDROM

As I mentioned in a recent rant my DVD burner seemed to have died or was MIA..  It wasn't showing in the BIOS or Windows of course, obviously wasn't working and appeared dead as a doornail. Well, I can report that as I suspected, it was a Windows issue and not hardware related.  I fixed it myself with the help of Google and the site mentioned below.

In the Event Viewer I had this error among a number of others related to paging files and of course the missing drive. 

When the problem started I had been looking through my backup discs for files and mods that I need for Oblivion, and other games, after having replaced a dead hard drive.  In between exploring one disc and the next I had plugged in my USB zip drive, copied files from it, then removed it correctly.   It seems Windows thought I wanted to remove the optical drive and not just the zip drive....stupid!

Of course nothing like this is mentioned on the Microsoft pages, but it is a Windows issue and not hardware related.

I'm like a terrier when it comes to researching problems and I found LOTS of complaints, old and recent, about disappearing optical and HDD's in Windows XP, Vista and Windows 7, but not quite the same as my problem.  Until, I came across this site where it describes exactly what happened to me, but seemingly usually happens in laptops. 
http://www.buzzle.com/articles/cd-drive-not-recognized.html

I had of course checked the cables but didn't completely unplug them because they were so tightly attached I had trouble getting them out, so I assumed it wasn't caused by loose connections.  This time with a lot of care, I completely unplugged the cables at the drive and motherboard and reseated them and now my drive is showing again in the BIOS and Windows, and most importantly...working.

I posted this here in case anyone else has the same or similar issues.  Last year I had a problem where the drive would only burn at 1x speed and by researching the problem I also managed to fix that issue which was a simple fix.

Here if anyone has the same problem.
http://www.pclicious.com/slow-burning-dvd-drive-how-to-fix-in-4-easy-steps/

Now to get my games installed before anything else goes wrong.