Argh. Too much computer troubles!

So the other day, after a perfectly normal night of WoW after a long day at work, I shut down my computer. A notice came up saying that it was installing 1 of 2 updates, and then it would shut down. There had been a lot of Windows updates lately, so I thought nothing of it.

Well, the next time I logged in, my screen looked horrible. My monitor is a generic, PnP 1680 x 1050 widescreen monitor that I had picked up at Costco. It had been working fine for years now, and suddenly, my graphics card couldn't support that resolution anymore. It was set to 1440 x 900 by default, and I couldn't for the life of me put it back to 1680 x 1050. I downloaded the latest drivers from Nvidia, even tried using their beta drivers, but none of those supported that resolution. I finally had to create a custom setting for that resolution, which I could only use after I checked off on Windows to not hide "non-supported" settings.

So I managed to get my desktop back to the normal size, albeit with the possibility that my monitor will explode in the near future.

But here's the worst part: it's made WoW run horribly. First off, WoW no longer has the setting to make the resolution at 1680 x 1050. Secondly, the framerate went from a decent 25 to 50 frames-per-second to 9. Sometimes 6, sometimes 16. But the framerate sucks now, and the game is laggy as hell.

I thought it might be due to the high population areas the graphics card was having trouble drawing in all the characters. But then I went to locations where there were virtually no one, and it was still laggy with a low framerate. I even set the effects to the lowest it could (without looking like absolute crap), but that didn't help.

Sigh. I don't know what the hell Vista is up to, but it just took a perfectly good set up and made it crap. The fact that my decent graphics card can't even support the native resolution of a friggin' plug-n-play monitor is the crappiest thing it's done lately. I don't know who to get mad at, Vista or Nvidia.

From some googling, this appears to be happening with a lot of other people, though I don't know what's the common ground. Some of the people suggested turning off all anti-virus and un-installing the current drivers before re-installing the updated ones. I've tried all that but so far no luck. Sigh.....