PC Ropear

If you are like me you have a laptop or a desktop that you can’t seem to install drivers on. I’ve been itching to use Nvidia’s CUDA. CUDA is using the GPU (graphics processing unit) to do calculations instead of the CPU. GPU’s have many more cores than a CPU to handle all of the video processing that needs to be done, Nvidia wanted to take advantage of that to do calculations such as Folding proteins using Folding@home. So a while back I downloaded the CUDA drivers and toolkit but when I went to install the drivers I got the error message “The Nvidia Setup program could not locate any drivers that are compatible with your current hardware. Setup will now exit.” I knew I had the right hardware, Quadro FX 570m, to run CUDA so I gave up until recently. More after the jump.

So I’ve had some free time so I decided to give CUDA another go. I realized the Nvidia released some new notebook specific drivers so I decided to download them hoping that they might be the answer to my problems. Unfortunately I got the same error. I learned that the problem was that Lenovo (I have the T61p) didn’t want me to install drivers other than theirs on my laptop. Unfortunately they haven’t updated their drivers since January of last year which I believe was before CUDA came out. So here is the step by step solution to my problem.

1. First you must make sure that you have hardware capable of running CUDA. The list can be found here. If you don’t know what hardware you are running you can easily find out by heading over to device manager. Hit Windows-R. This will open the run prompt. Type in devmgmt.msc. Then click on the plus next to display adapters.

2. If you made it past that step your well on your way to getting CUDA. Next you will want to download the proper drivers for your hardware by heading here. For all you early adopters like me they have Windows 7 drivers! The download may take some time.

3. Now this is the counter-intuitive part. You will want to try and install the drivers. If it works great! If it doesn’t, and if you are reading this then it probably won’t its ok. You have to run it anyway so it extracts all driver information.

4. If you extracted to the default directory you should be in C:\NVIDIA\…. For me it was C:\NVIDIA\Win7\185.85\IS\DISPLAY. If you use the Windows 7 notebook drivers there is file in this directory called ListDevices. This file specifies which .inf file to use. This is very important. If you don’t see this file no need to worry.

5. Now you will have to go to device manager, double click on display adapters, right click on your video card and click update driver software. Now you will want to find the Have Disk option. This is typically found by choosing the options that let you install the drivers by finding them yourself. You will want to locate the folder that the drivers were extracted to and find the .inf file. In most cases there is only one, if there is more than one, you should know which one to use by finding it in the ListDevices file.

6. Finish the install and enjoy CUDA!

Yep, that’s all there is too it. Window’s doesn’t care what kind of hardware you are running as long as it finds a driver to install. Thanks and see you later.