@JKxZ no, I was trying to get my machine to run Star Citizen again, I had no idea they stopped supporting windows 7 at the time...so in my efforts to find a fix, a website suggested a particular KB update may be necessary to fix the error I was getting trying to launch the game.
The update did nothing, I found out I couldn't launch because of windows 7, and just left it for a week.

And then my graphics driver crashed. Hard. Like, it's never done that before.

@JKxZ the long and short of it, I've got a secondhand GTX 980 Ti. After the crash, windows didn't even recognize it. I figured maybe a driver update would fix it. Didn't work. Uninstalled all drivers and did a clean install with the basic one that it auto installs off the Internet when you install the card. Worked fine. Updated drivers to latest. Not recognized. Okay. Rolled back to the driver I was on prior to the crash. Works fine...for a few days. Crashed again. A few days later, again.

@JKxZ I feel like maybe the gpu is overheating, or underpowered (I'm running it with a 550w PSU) since we're in the middle of a heatwave, and it seems quite hot down there. I've been monitoring everything and event viewer just shows a driver failure on 2 of the crashes, and shows nothing on the last one which happened last night. I have no idea what's wrong with it lol