If you are using Windows 7 SP1 or Windows 8.1 on a computer that has NVIDIA GeForce based graphics processor, then you may experience frequent driver crashes. NVIDIA GeForce drivers version 418.81 and above have a bug that can make the graphics processor unresponsive for many seconds. This means that your screen will freeze or go blank for a few seconds. You will feel this freezing much more visibly when you are watching a video or playing a computer game.
Fortunately, Windows has an inbuilt recovery mechanism called TDR (timeout detection and recovery). When Windows detects that graphics processor has become unresponsive for more than two seconds, it will reset the graphics driver. By resetting the graphics driver, Windows ensures that the various processes using graphics processor do not freeze (which in turn can cause the operating system to hang).
If you have installed the NVIDIA GeForce driver version 418.81, your computer may experience this problem of freezing the graphics processor and then Windows using TDR to recover from it again and again. This problem exists in the drivers meant only for Windows 7 SP1 and Windows 8.1 but Windows 10 is safe. Furthermore, only the 64-bit versions of Windows are affected
In order to fix this problem withe the graphics processor driver, you can download and install the driver version 418.99. This updated driver is a hotfix update and does not introduce any new features. As mentioned before, NVIDIA has advised that this update is only meant for the Windows 7 SP1 and Windows 8.1 users with 64-bit operating systems.
Alternatively, you can also uninstall the existing graphics driver, and later install a newer version of the graphics driver by downloading the drivers package from the official NVIDIA drivers website: https://www.geforce.com/drivers. The website has drive detection tool using which you can download latest versions of drivers available for your system.
You can download NVIDIA GeForce update 418.99 from https://nvidia.custhelp.com/app/answers/detail/a_id/4775.