It would seem that GeForce video cards are so popular that the drivers for them should literally be “cleaned up”, and there should be no problems with their installation. But the harsh reality is that many users, when installing Windows for the first time or as a result of updating the video driver, suddenly encounter the error “It is impossible to continue installing nVidia.”
Usually, reinstalling is also ineffective. But it is rather difficult to imagine full-fledged work on a computer without “native” drivers. If you have ever booted in protected mode, you will understand what this is about. The situation, of course, is fixable, but you need to know how. We will talk about this today.
Contents
Hardware problems
They are unlikely, but it will not hurt to check the performance of the video card.
To do this, launch the “Control Panel” and go to the “Device Manager”. Open the “Video adapters” branch and look at the state of your graphics accelerator. If to the left of it you can see an icon with a yellow triangle and an exclamation mark, then this is precisely indicative of the existence of problems.
Double-click on the name of the video card and in the window that opens, look in the “General” tab to see the state of the device. Here we will describe the problem due to which the video card does not work, with an error code.
The easiest way is to take a known working video adapter, connect it and check the yellow triangle in the device manager again, and if it is not there, repeat the driver installation. And, to finally make sure that the old card is not working, you can connect it to another computer. If it turns out to be problematic there, most likely, it will need to be scrapped, since the repair of video cards, especially powerful ones, is a financially costly event.
Installing drivers manually
If the driver installation is interrupted with the error “It is impossible to continue installing NVIDIA”, while below this phrase it says about the incompatibility of the hardware with the current version of Windows, you should try the following:
- open the “Device Manager” again – through the “Control Panel” or using the “Run” console (a combination of Win + R followed by entering the command devmgmt.msc);
- go to the “Video adapters” branch, see our map and delete it by right-clicking on the name and selecting the “Delete” item in the context menu;
- close all active windows, restart the computer;
- Windows will detect the absence of a graphics subsystem and will automatically detect the video card and start the installation of its driver;
- again go to the “Device Manager”, in the “Video adapters” branch. Right-click again on the GPU name and select the “Update drivers” item;
- when the Wizard window opens, select the line “Search for drivers …”;
- click on the “Browse” button and go to the nVidia directory created during the Windows installation (by default – C: NVIDIA), put a tick on the “Include subfolders” option, click “Next”;
- if the installation was successful, we restart the computer, if not, you need to use the driver for our hardware from the manufacturer.
It is installed as follows:
- go to the official nVidia website;
- click on the “Drivers” tab, in the pop-up context menu, select the “Load drivers” item;
- we indicate the type of product, in our case – GeForce, the series (it is present in the name in the “Device Manager”), our version of Windows and the interface language. We press “Search”;
- in the new window, click the “Supported Products” button to make sure that this series also includes our specific video card model. If so, click on the “Download Now” button;
- the window of the license agreement will be highlighted, press the button “Accept and download”;
- in the new window, select the “Save” button and, if necessary, indicate the folder in which the installer will be placed;
- wait for the download to complete, run the downloaded file;
- the first thing the installer will do is check the compatibility of the selected driver with the hardware installed on the computer;
- then you will be offered two installation options: express (recommended) and custom installation (for advanced users). We choose the first option;
- a window will appear prompting you to install the proprietary GeForce Experience utility (the checkmark will already be present). You can refuse by unchecking the checkbox, but it’s better not to do this – the application is really very useful, especially for gamers;
- press the “Next” button and observe the progress bar of the driver installation;
- after the installation is complete, click the “Close” button.
As you can see, installing the driver manually is not difficult, and this is the best option even in cases where the installation of “firewood” in Windows is normal.
Removing nVidia apps
If the manual installation of the video card driver in Windows 10/8/7 ended with the error “It is impossible to continue installing nVidia”, it is likely that the reason is the presence of files from previous versions, which for some reason were not removed or it was done incorrectly.
In such cases, it is necessary to uninstall all applications related to the developer, having previously removed the uninstalled driver in the “Device Manager”.
To do this, press Win + R, in the Run console, type in the appwiz.cpl command and press Enter. The “Uninstall / change programs” window will open, in which you need to sort the highlighted list of installed applications by the “Publisher” field, find all lines beginning with the word “NVIDIA” and remove these programs.
We reboot the computer and try to install the native drivers again.
Disable antivirus
The main purpose of antivirus software is to protect your computer from any external threats, and in this difficult mission, these programs often overdo it, blocking the installation of even completely safe and popular applications. In particular, when using the proprietary GeForce Experience utility, the error “It is impossible to continue installing NVIDIA” may pop up, and the driver installation will be interrupted.
So you can try to disable the antivirus while installing the video driver. In most cases, to do this, you can right-click on the antivirus icon located on the taskbar, and in the menu that appears, select the item to disable protection.
If there is no such option, you need to open the control panel, go to the settings and find a way to temporarily disable the anti-virus protection, and then try to install the video driver again.
Renaming the nVidia folder
If all of the above steps ended unsuccessfully, there is one more trick, how to fix the error with interrupting the installation of the NVIDIA driver.
There is a small chance that the reason is that the driver installation fails due to the presence of the NVIDIA Corporation folder located in the Program Files directory. If you rename this folder, give it any other name, then the installation process can go fine. To do this, right-click on the folder name and select the “Rename” item. You can change just one letter, and that will be enough for our purposes.
We try to run the installer and enjoy the positive result.
Output
As you can see, the reasons for the unsuccessful installation of the video driver can be different, as well as the ways to solve the problem, but they all do not require the use of such radical measures as reinstalling Windows. The main thing to remember is that a driver is a small program that provides an interface between the graphics accelerator and the operating system, and this program must match both components.