Could updating my graphics card driver somehow mess with my monitor/performance?

hi there. i'll preface this by saying that i'm not very knowledgeable when it comes to PCs, so apologies in advance if this seems silly, or if it gets rambly.

i recently bought a gaming pc that arrived yesterday. CybertronPC Hellion Gaming PC || AMD FX-6300 3.50GHz 6-Core Processor | 4.10GHzGHz Turbo Speed | AMD 760G Chipset || NVIDIA GeForce GT 640 (2GB) || 16GB RAM, DDR3 || Windows 8.1 64-bit

i got started pretty quickly. the monitor that i had lined up died on me, so my brother lent me his monitor (AOC, LED) so that i could set up and stuff. i installed some necessaries and a game (overwatch, whoo!). the pc isn't a new model so i expected the drivers wouldn't be up to date. i checked the graphics card and yep, 17 months out-of-date. i chose the option to let windows search and automatically update the driver software (my first mistake?). it took a while, but eventually finished. i shut down the computer, disconnected the monitor and handed it back over to my brother.

i had plans to get an old monitor from a friend. this morning while my brother was out, i borrowed his monitor again in the interim, just to install some more stuff. except this time, the monitor wouldn't come on. it went through the usual boot up screens and whatever, i saw the windows logo, and after that, just a blank screen. i could see my mouse arrow, but nothing else. i couldn't access my desktop no matter what i did. i tried everything, made sure the monitor was correctly connected on both ends, hard-restarted several times. i did some googling and tried to troubleshoot. ALT+CTRL+DEL, CTRL+SHIFT+ESC, none of that worked. most sites suggested i tried to restart in safe mode, but mashing F8 on the boot screen did nothing because something something fucking windows 8.1. (i also tried SHIFT+F8.) i was pretty bummed out, but then my friend came over with the monitor for me (a really old ACER). i hooked it up, not expecting any different, but low and behold, everything booted up fine. i logged in no problem. but when i checked, windows was back to telling me that my drivers are 17 months out of date.

so, was that the problem? at first i figured it could be my brother's monitor, but nope, he's all hooked up again to his own computer and it's working fine. did updating the graphics card somehow temporarily fuck with the monitor? is there some kind of compatibility issue? or am i worried for nothing? this isn't the latest and greatest PC, but it's pretty okay, and when i run games i want them to perform as best as they can. so i obviously want to update the graphics card, but not if it's going to cause me a bunch of problems. i've already been to nvidia's site to manually grab the update, but i want to hold off on updating until i understand a little better what happened, and know whether or not that black screen of death has a chance of happening again.

advice, suggestions, opinions and experiences of your own are all appreciated.

TL;DR i updated my graphics card driver and the monitor i was using then went kaput in a way that didn't seem easily fixable. now i'm using a different monitor and everything seems okay, but i'm afraid to update again. could updating my graphics card driver somehow mess with my monitor/performance?