Drivers out of date problem..

I have a Geforce 8500 series, I have all the drivers updated, even tried reinstalling the driver update, but it still says SL is out of date.. I checked to see if the firewall was blocking SL, but its not... so right now I am at a loss of what to do, any suggestions?

You said that the message says SL is out of date..........I assume you meant your drivers are out of date. The driver message is sort of a catch all for anything relating to a problem running SL and being able to render the graphics that SL requires. Many people get the "driver out of date" message when they have the latest drivers for their video cards or chipsets. It could mean your driver may be corrupted or improperly installed. It could mean you have more than one driver for your card that confuse SL into thinking it's wrong or not supported. Some older drivers don't have the proper OpenGL support that is the heart of SL. The message can be misleading.

The nVidia 8500 card should run SL without much problems. However some driver version in combination with individual computer hardware setups just won't take properly. I had that problem myself with my nVidia 8600GT..........the most recent driver would not work on my machine. I got the same message you got. I knew the card worked because it did just fine before I updated my driver. It turned out that I needed to go back a few versions to get one that did work. That driver version is 169.25. I cannot guarantee that version will work on yours but it is worth a try. You might need to do as I did and take one driver at a time......downloading, installing and checking until I found the first one to work.

When you go to nVidia's website for your drivers there is a link to "how to properly install your drivers"..........read it. I contains some really basic but very valuable information to install drivers properly with a minimum of problems. Drivers (all drivers, not just video drivers) are more critical that most other software..........any little bit of garbage or corruption will cause major issues.

The way I do driver updates is first I go find the driver I need (or want). Download it to my hard driver (DO NOT use any auto updating utility). Scan it with my anitvirus. Then go and uninstall the driver I'm replacing. That will require a rebooting of your computer.........when it does Windows will see "new hardware" and want to search and install a driver for it. Don't let Windows do that. Just close the box. Then install the driver from the file you downloaded. You will need to restart again and then everything should be fine.

If you need to search for a dirver like I had to then you must do that procedure each time. Tedious, I know. One other thing. If you have any older, unused drivers uninstall them too. You only want one driver for each hardware device. In theory unused drivers won't interfere..........in reality, they often do.

Good luck.

Well, that is for windows Vista. I am using Window's xp..

If you go to archived drivers on the nVidia site it will give you a search dialog (just like searching for the most recent drivers) where you tell the search your operating system, video card, etc. I only mentioned my driver as a POSSIBLE driver that would work......I did not tell you it was the one that would work. Your video card is not the same as mine either.

Just go to nVidia's site and search. Without the pertenant information no one else can do it for you.

Edit:

I just went to nVidia and searched the "beta and archived drivers". I put in your card (GF8500GT) and Windows XP. This is the page that came up.

http://www.nvidia.com/Download/Find.aspx?lang=en-us