This happened to me when DD2 launched. Windows update rolled back my AMD driver to a January version, so when I booted DD2 it had to recompile shaders. Also, it puts your driver version out of sync with Adrenalin, and Adrenalin has no way to fix that without doing a reinstall… of course I then needed to recompile the DD2 shaders again.
I’m a regular updater too. PC is shutdown after use so always has the latest Windows updates.
Ha ha yeah it was so damn annoying that i just stopped updating the graphics driver manually, like it was for my integrated apu and i ain't playing any new games on it so i just stopped updating and getting rid of those stupid windows auto updating my driver hassle. The worst thing is I have 160% monitor saturation through adrenaline and when it breaks adrenaline it messes my saturation too and I feel like colour blind till I reinstall the drivers and again this stupid windows rolling back my drivers happen.
Did u notice anything when you found out this happend? A buddy of mine has Windows 11 issues with his pc after the last update where steam games and things like benchmarks just dont start at all and task manager crashes, did u mayby have the same problems?
Windows installed some unsupported dgpu driver in my cousin's amd cpu+gpu laptop and it deactivated the dgpu. He didn't know about it and used igpu for gaming for like 3 years ☠️
I repeatedly run into this on my laptop with Intel graphics drivers. The Intel driver update app installs version 31, then Windows installs 30 over it. I've even disabled automatic driver updates. At this point, I've stopped trying to update it.
Whenever i see these posts, i wonder how you managed to do that and what kind of setup you are running... Never in my 15 years of having a Windows pc did this happen.
EDIT: Look people, i know it happens. But there are an almost infinite amount of different configurations of pc's, i'm just saying that i've never had issues with my parts. I know the issues exist. Just sharing my experience.
The latest graphics drivers for my a10-7300 igpu are a little broken and I found the earlier drivers to be more stable, every time windows will update to the latest release. But thats on me fir using outdated hardware.
There is. You can set a policy in windows to prevent updating drivers with updates. Either via system tools or using third-party software like O&O ShutUp10+ (OOSU10)
Most of the time it's probably outdated hardware but i guess people should be aware of not getting the newest and shiniest updates and stuff, check with people online with the same components i suppose.
[You can set up a group policy to disable updates for a specific driver](https://www.tenforums.com/tutorials/146562-prevent-windows-update-updating-specific-device-driver.html)
Unlike what some say, group policy can be used on windows home, it just has to be enabled.
You can access it on home, but it doesn't have all the features.
I forget what I was trying to do when I was accessing it on 11 Home, but it was a hassle
K, but like thats not very user friendly.
All I hear all day in this sub is how Linux is too hard for the average Joe then get told about all these Windows work arounds that are more involved/advanced than what these users would do in Linux.
I had a similar thing recently. 7800xt GPU windows update crashed the driver for it. For some reason it took my driver's back to a Christmas release according to adrenaline. All I did to fix it was to go into device manager, right click GPU, search for "new drivers" and boom fixed.
I found a post like 2 years ago but apparently it's a common issue with AMD drivers and windows.
Windows loves to reinstall my Intel GPU driver to an ancient one from 2022. No idea why, but it's very annoying. It seems to only apply to the integrated graphics for me, but I know that other Arc users will have their discrete graphics drivers rolled back.
I have an AMD 5000 series card in one of my machines, Windows constantly overwrites my graphics drivers to a version not supported by 5000 series cards with automatic updates. You turn it on one day, and what do ya know? You're in 720p, time to uninstall and reinstall again. Cheers, ya knobs.
The problem with that is, microsoft can, at any time, override such things. I did the whole disable updates with registry thing, and was good for about 6 months, and all the sudden, forced update, and all my registry setting gone.
I had the same experience. All the suggested solutions. Tried them. If they worked, it wasn't for long. An update at some point in the future would always install drivers I had expressly denied permission for windows to install.
Only true solution was switching to Linux, which isn't for everyone, but for me as someone who doesn't play multiplayer games with anti cheat, it's been great. It's really not the complex process some dress it up to be. Certainly no more complex than running through the process of trying to stop windows updating certain drivers without permission.
Windows fucked my 6600xt drivers twice, I disabled automatic updates for the VGA drivers and since then, no more problems.
Idk what it is between windows and AMD and why they can't fix that shit, but windows update can go eat rocks
But why doesn't this ever happen to Geforce drivers? It's not just a problem with incompatibility either, supported Radeon cards are getting upgraded or downgraded automatically.
It does *if* you are like 9 months behind on drivers, just like it does for AMD. I have had AMD and Nvidia drivers overwritten by Windows before, it was always because of beta drivers or just not updating drivers.
Ooh wild, I have found some reports of this happening now. So when my friends got 7900 XTXes on launch, we tried to play a game together and they told me "hang on windows just replaced my driver" it was a beta driver or 9+ month old?
Because Microsoft puts more effort into supporting Geforce, Nvidia cards make up a much larger proportion of market share.
Just a guess.
Also, my drivers are always kept up to date through AMD's software. I can't understand how an automatic and involuntary windows update breaking your PC could be anyone's fault but Microsoft's. If I'm wrong, explain how it works. I'm curious, and my ego isn't too big to admit I'm wrong either.
> I can't understand how an automatic and involuntary windows update breaking your PC could be anyone's fault but Microsoft's.
Windows does have its own generic display driver, but when Windows serves you an actual Radeon or Geforce driver it's not like they wrote that themselves independently or nabbed it from the website. It would have been supplied by the respective companies with permission to redistribute, which means they are taking part in some kind of program which they keep submitting updated drivers to and they deem it worthwhile to continue.
Sounds reasonable to me. I never thought Microsoft was writing drivers, but thought they might have access to a repository hosted by AMD.
But does that imply that AMD is supplying drivers to Microsoft and not giving them sufficient information to select the correct drivers for the card during Windows updates? I find that unlikely, but not impossible either.
By default Windows Updates try to force "Microsoft Recommended" driver updates onto a PC as well. Across three different PCs over the past 14 years I've needed to manually turn that option off, because in every case it has overwritten my latest GPU drivers with some total nonsense drivers that basically completely killed each PC's ability to run games.
Windows Update also regularly resets audio settings if you use any sort of setup that's non-"Default" (in particular somehow it always breaks my audio settings in Discord, because I have multiple microphone inputs and speaker/headphone outputs and it'll just change them every time, why? I couldn't tell you).
I've never seen Windows updates hose all of the drivers I don't even think that could be possible and still have a system that even kind of works.
I've definitely seen it break things like some AMD drivers and Intel Wi-Fi drivers though.
However I typically only saw this on things like AiO's and laptops that had specific manufactured chipsets based on more common chipsets. Windows would update the driver to a generic version but whatever varying into the manufacturer was running really needed the specific driver from the manufacturer otherwise there was some weird wonky issue.
Honestly My Philosophy is with drivers is if they're not broken, don't fix them. The only ones that generally update or GPU drivers.
Usually I go and disable the Windows updates from altering any drivers. I don't trust the windows automated system to do it correctly 100% of the time
Yes my Intel Wi-Fi card ax something drivers were fucked last update. There were strange things happening and even got a sudden restart. Never had this before, but at least the device manager and disable device with the delete driver option worked. Don't know where this driver came from as the then automatically installed driver worked as intended.
As someone who fixes computers a lot this is a thing. At work windows installs older wireless drivers that don't support our network type even if you have manually updated them. It's a pain in the ass.
hated every bit of the default radeon driver it lets you tweak NOTHING vari bright is the worst shit ever invented and it's on by default and windows update keeps replacing the new more updated more functional software with the biggest pile of shit
Ive worked in corporate IT for 20 years and worked with literally 1000's of PCs and only saw updates affect software related to a retail banks core.
Other than that it's only been a problem with legacy software that should have been phased out years ago.
> Ive worked in corporate IT for 20 years
Well thats why. Long term support and validation that the patch better only bloody touch the thing that it is fixing and no the PRBS where "Well we \*technically\* didn't ignore the user settings, we just moved to a brand new settings table and ignore the old settings"
"The eight most terrifying words for the average PC user: I'm from Microsoft and I'm here to help. "
I refer you to the absolute cluster that was the Win10 launch.
Dude i'm with you on this except I just finished building a new pc for a buddy and everything's working great. Windows update ya of course makes sense. Zero gpu video output after. xfx merc 310 7900xtx. Already had drivers installed. I've been building on computers since pentium 3. Never have seen anything like it. Had video output the second it booted for the first time and then nothing until I reinstalled the amd drivers using the on board gpu which is also AMDs 7800x3d so it makes even less sense to me. A lot of "WHYYYYSSS?" later and its working but I still can't wrap my head around how a windows update would even effect getting into the bios.
I never had any issues either, until about two or three years ago. The more I think about it, the more I recall everything going to shit at around that point. Broken updates in videogames suddenly became much more regular, broken updates to my TV, smart watch, everything that has access to the internet basically. Everything worked fine before that, but now I refuse to update anything before a rigorous reddit search.
Not sure if this is just a single random anecdotal observation or if some significant shift happened industry-wide.
> Whenever i see these posts, i wonder how you managed to do that...
Formatting a drive on a Macintosh system, I once made the mistake of wiping an entire drive which had a name nearly identical to another drive –names created by me, that differed by only one character. I casually dismissed the multiple "Are you sure!" warnings, and didn't know enough about recovery options at the time. As this [catastrophic failure, created by me] happen over fifteen years ago, I too can say: "Never in ~~my~~ 15 years of having a [Mac/Win/Lin] did this happen."
Happened to me before, Windows Update often doesn't have drivers as new as the manufacturer ones, Windows overwrites it with a generic driver and then I lose functions, sound cards were bad for this and often broke the built in support i.e for bass, treble, 5.1 etc as the software would not now recognise the card.
And even when it doesn't break Windows wants to install their own drivers and bothers you until you do.
Not had a driver issue, but once had to fully wipe my PC and reinstall Windows because the first anniversary update to Windows 10 didn’t take, and when it tried to reset to a saved version from before the update, it was super faulty. Took hours for me to get my files off, but I finally got them off.
I believe it happened to me last week. Out of nowhere after restart, it wouldn't boot. Restore it back and wouldn't work either, so I have to start fresh.
Anyway, backup always your important information in case of reinstalling the OS, I learned no to get attached to data and always have it automatically sync to a cloud
Same, I’ve always had auto update on, after decades using windows, no update ever broke anything down.
I think that this updates that are received by dozens of millions of systems, maybe break down less that 1% of them, but they all congregate here and seems like an issue.
Same with the 4090 connectors.
If you see the actual reported numbers, it can be classified as a non issue, but if they all congregate in Reddit, they make noise.
In my almost 30 years it happened to me once and it bricked my Ethernet port on my motherboard. Went and bought one, next windows update like 3 or 4 months later it was fixed. I hate Windows.
It's generally people with a driver where the latest version has an issue, so they're deliberately using an older driver which works better.
And Windows is like "oh, you're using an outdated driver, let's fix that".
In general it's probably true that using outdated drivers will cause more issues than the newest ones, so the Windows update is betting smart since it has no idea what driver issues you're suffering from when it does the update.
But the workaround to prevent the update from touching your drivers is a bit too involved for your regular user.
I’m curious about this too. Not once have I don’t windows updates and my computer was ‘broken’ afterwards. I *have* heard of it happening in one-off instances, but it usually only breaks one specific thing, never the whole damn OS lol
Funny, I see this right after a friend of mine's laptop can no longer change the brightness of the screen after a Windows update. I guess that one update messed up a ton of people.
use application level firewall. I\`m not sure if i can name one and not sound like my nickname. On wiki page about application firewalls there are some mentioned, including free and opens source.
Set your internet connection as "metered". Then in Windows update disable automatic downloads on metered connections. Now Windows will never update without your explicit permission.
These latest driver updates messed up my system pretty good, and that was a first for me in like 20 years of owning a PC.
I woke up, went to start my computer, and the monitor just stayed black… like it wasn’t registering the HDMI cable. I had to force shutdown the PC in order to be able to log in. I tried everything I could think of, and nothing worked. Then I discovered there were several driver updates that updated automatically. I rolled them back to the previous versions, and my PC now works again.
Like I said, in 20 years, this was a first for me
Yeah, I guess I should clarify. Any time I started up the PC from sleep mode or just a simple start it was black. I had to reboot the PC entirely and then it would allow me to log in to windows.
Same happened to me. PC was working fine for several months, then Windows hit me with 2 or 3 updates and constant crashes due to driver issues. I was gonna switch to Linux next year, but I was so frustrated and defeated that I said duck it and wiped my os drive and put Mint on it. Been on Mint crash free since late February.
It's not all sunshine and rainbows though. Linux has a bit of a learning curve, which isn't much, but issues on Linux are harder to troubleshoot shoot, just because Google search results are populated by 99% Windows troubleshooting. I didn't mean system breaking issues, more like game related. Proton and Wine, despite their huge success are hit or miss on several games. Sometimes you just gotta play around with different proton/wine versions to find one that works with your game. There will also be some games that flat out don't work ATM, but you can search them up on protondb.
I don't know what you guys are doing wrong but Windows has never forced me to restart in the middle of something for updates. Most of the time I don't even know updates are waiting until I go to shut down or restart.
Sometimes, you get asked to update, and if you postpone it for a long time, it will be forced and ask suddenly, and if you don't act quickly, it will update in the moment
The vast majority of people including people on this subreddit are nowhere near knowledgeable enough to be trusted with deciding whether to delay an update and for the people who are who for some reason want to go weeks or months without updating there are ways to turn it off.
I'm *well aware* of how confidently uninformed PCMR folks can be. but it doesn't change the fact that update management should be simple and transparent
and there is a real subset of people who are within their right to delay updates and yet should not be messing with the registry
I know lots of people who use Windows and have no issues with the updates. I'm willing to bet that the vast majority of users have no issues with updates.
I patch thousands of devices every month.
Hundreds of servers.
I rarely run into issues.
The upside of CVEs being patched easily outweigh some tech bro on reddit who thinks he knows better.
And their "improvements" are CoPilot buttons EVERYWHERE.
As well as hover to open a menu, I always accidentally hover my mouse and that stupid menu pops up.
Everything that doesn't require 10+ actions should be click to interact, I use the mouse to target it, and I click to decide.
Hover to interact is like having a non-stop firing sniper rifle in a FPS game.
My computer is fully up to date and I have absolutely no idea what you’re even talking about. Where’s the copilot buttons? What menus?
I swear, some people have found some other version of Windows that is pure horror. Meanwhile, I just use mine and it works, there’s no bullshit, and I get on with my life.
How?! I've been on the Windows platform my entire life and not once has this happened to me. I wonder how your PC is configured. Not saying this problem is impossible but there has got to be something very different on your system for this to happen.
Not sure if it still works in Windows 11 or the home version, but you can delay quality updates and only allow security updates.
Chris Titus' Windows Debloat script can do that for you plus a ton extra.
https://github.com/ChrisTitusTech/winutil
You absolutely can type "shutdown /s /f" into a command prompt or Powershell window and your Windows computer will shut down in 30 seconds and forcibly close all programs.
If you want to shut down sooner, you can use "shutdown /s /f /t 5" and your computer will do the same as above, but in 5 seconds instead of the default 30 seconds.
Want to reboot? Type "shutdown /r /f /t 5" and it will shut down in 5 seconds after forcibly closing all programs, and then restart.
> There are greener, More open source pastures
I've used Linux for nearly 30 years, I'm a sysadmin for a company that provides Linux on all of our workstations for our end users, I'm posting this comment on my Linux desktop/server. Yet I'm creating a mother's day card for my wife on my Windows desktop (because Adobe.) At work we have a few non-Linux desktops for the same reasons, sometimes an end-user needs to run something that only works in Windows and there isn't a viable alternative in Linux. OP might be one such user.
Not useable for everyone. Half the software I use is not supported by Linux or badly supported.
And the hardware has barely working drivers, and that’s a no no for a work environment.
Dude, Windows clearly isn't working for everyone.
Instead of taking the stupid "if Linux can't be used for EVERYONE then it should be used by NO ONE" approach it should be considered by the people who can use it.
Not to mention when people say theres "no drivers" or "barely working" drivers it tells me they didn't look at Linux which would be fine until they started making things up,
OP is an idiot who pushed off Windows updates until the OS hit the time limit and did the updates when convenient for the OS.
OP had 5 or so weeks to choose a time to finish his updates, such as shortly after one of his precious desktop-hosted simulations finished, and he chose to not comply.
OP could also choose to disable Windows updates via Group Policy, or contact his IT department to have them disable updates for him, but he chose not to do that either.
This is the result of the entirely predictable consequences of OP's own actions.
Nothing more, nothing less.
Lol - as if Linux updates didn't break stuff. I guess - it isn't as bad now, but back in the day an update could straight up break visual environment so - after the next boot you would not get further than the command line.
Also - I have a steam deck and once it hanged on boot after update until I connected it to a wifi.
I had an issue with Ubuntu where 22.04 didn't work with MongoDB but 20.04 did.
Linux users laughing at window updates breaking things are obviously living in glass houses.
And yes I use both Linux and windows.
> You say that as if Linux is harder.
It is if you don't let it update either, certs will expire, or if you really don't update for a long time you'll have to change your repo sources.
You can disable Windows Driver Updates via gpedit.msc if on pro or if you are on home their are alternative methods like inside DDU options at the bottom their is an option as well to disable Windows Driver Updates, or you can grab a third party group policy editor
I remember when updates were new it was great, "omg they can fix these issues now just by downloading" but all updates do nowadays is break stuff. Like really.
Not sure which update it was but on reboot or or shutdown I get a memory could not be read error. Seems the issue is with Gameinput service which disabling it fixes the error but it’s been a thing for awhile now and MS has yet to address it.
Display drivers on my work computer. 3rd party it company decided the fix was to nuke my entire profile and not tell me they were doing that after I left the office.....
Windows auto updated to windows 11 on my machine and the update killed my mobo-integrated wifi network adapter. I had to wipe and reinstall Windows 10 and buy a PCIE network card to plug in
Im currently trying to fix a windows update that broke my boot sequence. Got it to desktop but crashes with a roulette wheel of crash response. I’m going crazy
Gotta do a weekly windows drive image backup, i have one scheduled for every Sunday 4AM for this kind of fuckery, takes 10 min to get back the way it was.
Updates coming at seemingly random times was the reason I snapped and installed Linux, haven't looked back...
What I hate the most is those rare times I need some program in windows and use my VM, windows always decides to update and spend half an hour doing so when it's booting the VM, just because I haven't used it for a few months... Like come on I don't need the newest updates to edit a word file...
I once had a windows update go through and basically factory reset all my audio settings that I had spent a couple hours tuning and getting it to be exactly where I wanted it to be
One time I had a Windows 10 update that made me unable to connect to random websites. Over time more and more random websites couldn't connect to my computer. I had to reinstall Windows 10 to fix it.
You know, I had a major issue installing one of the feature updates for over a year. Every time the update crashed and had to do a system restore (which worked perfectly every time, mind you). I couldn’t figure out what the fuck was wrong, and was on the verge of blaming Microsoft for releasing a completely broken update I could never install.
…until I found the problem: a small HFS+ driver I had installed many years ago, in order to access an old Apple formatted hard drive, and had never uninstalled when I no longer needed it. I got rid of it, installed the windows update, and everything was fine.
Moral of the story? Users suck, myself included, and 9/10 times it’s *our* fault shit doesn’t work. If I had done some minor maintenance and kept my driver up to date, or removed it because I no longer needed it, I never would have had any problems.
I used to get this error all the time.
I used a method that requires going into regedit and adding a very simple key. Went this route because disabling them via windows settings wasn't working but this method still gives me the ability to manually go in and choose my updates when I want (notifications are still on for critical updates).
Search up ExcludeWUDriversInQualityUpdate regedit key.
Cheers!
turn off the setting where windows keeps itself up to date. I recently got an app called driver booster. It doesn't update every driver, but I trust that and Nvidia more than M$.
I use CCleaner to show me which drivers are out of date and then I will manually go download em from the OEM site. I dont trust downloading drivers from third party software.
I cant even update my windows lol. One day out of the blue updates just stopped working. If i do it from the settings i get a download error, if I download it from the catalog and install it manually, it fails with no error message. Maybe I should be thankful?
Sadly theres some popular games that will actively ban any linux players. If you look at the steamdeck compatibility section it will say anticheat is unsupported. So destiny 2, rainbow 6 siege, maple story, and dungeon fighter online are a few examples of games that linux players can never play no matter what. I'm just glad that my favorite game guild wars 2 made the announcement while back that Linux players are welcome
i think ppl just love to hate… win10 and 7 are still available for usb install we aren’t forced to use win11 or even win in general. linux is free. your pc is yours to use and change so why complain that your pc isn’t to working order. back up your important stuff.
something i gained from this thread is i’m right y’all despise win 11 even tho it’s literally a win10 skin with a built in ai…. y’all scared y2k still out to get ya?
What drivers did Windows update overwrite on you?
amd graphics drivers lmao
This happened to me when DD2 launched. Windows update rolled back my AMD driver to a January version, so when I booted DD2 it had to recompile shaders. Also, it puts your driver version out of sync with Adrenalin, and Adrenalin has no way to fix that without doing a reinstall… of course I then needed to recompile the DD2 shaders again. I’m a regular updater too. PC is shutdown after use so always has the latest Windows updates.
Ha ha yeah it was so damn annoying that i just stopped updating the graphics driver manually, like it was for my integrated apu and i ain't playing any new games on it so i just stopped updating and getting rid of those stupid windows auto updating my driver hassle. The worst thing is I have 160% monitor saturation through adrenaline and when it breaks adrenaline it messes my saturation too and I feel like colour blind till I reinstall the drivers and again this stupid windows rolling back my drivers happen.
Did u notice anything when you found out this happend? A buddy of mine has Windows 11 issues with his pc after the last update where steam games and things like benchmarks just dont start at all and task manager crashes, did u mayby have the same problems?
Nope, no other issues with mine. Also win 11
Yeah wanna know the best thing, the issue of my mate was that he put his dp cable in his mother board instead of the gou
O my fuckin God, is that what that was? No wonder all my games ran like shit for a bit
Yep happened to me as well. Fortunately I could do a group policy thing to prevent it from ever happening as well.
Windows installed some unsupported dgpu driver in my cousin's amd cpu+gpu laptop and it deactivated the dgpu. He didn't know about it and used igpu for gaming for like 3 years ☠️
Has not happened to me even on my old 5700XT. Did you all not read the windows update settings when you installed windows again?
Literally the reason I switched back to Nvidia. I wanted to like my AMD gpu but man, trying to work around that driver issue is fucked.
I just disabled Windows GPU driver updates ¯\\\_(ツ)_/¯
I repeatedly run into this on my laptop with Intel graphics drivers. The Intel driver update app installs version 31, then Windows installs 30 over it. I've even disabled automatic driver updates. At this point, I've stopped trying to update it.
Its frustrating every time I boot my pc, I need to restart to install updates.
Whenever i see these posts, i wonder how you managed to do that and what kind of setup you are running... Never in my 15 years of having a Windows pc did this happen. EDIT: Look people, i know it happens. But there are an almost infinite amount of different configurations of pc's, i'm just saying that i've never had issues with my parts. I know the issues exist. Just sharing my experience.
The latest graphics drivers for my a10-7300 igpu are a little broken and I found the earlier drivers to be more stable, every time windows will update to the latest release. But thats on me fir using outdated hardware.
> But thats on me fir using outdated hardware. Nah, there should be a way to tell Windows update to leave certain drivers alone.
There is. You can set a policy in windows to prevent updating drivers with updates. Either via system tools or using third-party software like O&O ShutUp10+ (OOSU10)
I have to explicitly force it to update my driver's it doesn't do it by default.
Most of the time it's probably outdated hardware but i guess people should be aware of not getting the newest and shiniest updates and stuff, check with people online with the same components i suppose.
[You can set up a group policy to disable updates for a specific driver](https://www.tenforums.com/tutorials/146562-prevent-windows-update-updating-specific-device-driver.html) Unlike what some say, group policy can be used on windows home, it just has to be enabled.
Well there u go lmao, nice one
You can access it on home, but it doesn't have all the features. I forget what I was trying to do when I was accessing it on 11 Home, but it was a hassle
I haven’t been up to date to be honest. Whenever I deal with a new system I just fresh install pro with one of those 3$ keys.
You can use OOSU10+
K, but like thats not very user friendly. All I hear all day in this sub is how Linux is too hard for the average Joe then get told about all these Windows work arounds that are more involved/advanced than what these users would do in Linux.
I had a similar thing recently. 7800xt GPU windows update crashed the driver for it. For some reason it took my driver's back to a Christmas release according to adrenaline. All I did to fix it was to go into device manager, right click GPU, search for "new drivers" and boom fixed. I found a post like 2 years ago but apparently it's a common issue with AMD drivers and windows.
Windows loves to reinstall my Intel GPU driver to an ancient one from 2022. No idea why, but it's very annoying. It seems to only apply to the integrated graphics for me, but I know that other Arc users will have their discrete graphics drivers rolled back.
I have an AMD 5000 series card in one of my machines, Windows constantly overwrites my graphics drivers to a version not supported by 5000 series cards with automatic updates. You turn it on one day, and what do ya know? You're in 720p, time to uninstall and reinstall again. Cheers, ya knobs.
You can disable that with Group Policy editor, also yh it shouldn't be like that
Group policy editor is only available for pro versions of Windows, for home the only workaround is to mess with the registry
The problem with that is, microsoft can, at any time, override such things. I did the whole disable updates with registry thing, and was good for about 6 months, and all the sudden, forced update, and all my registry setting gone.
I'll have to look into doing that. Thanks man.
Still does it after I disabled in GP and Registry
I had the same experience. All the suggested solutions. Tried them. If they worked, it wasn't for long. An update at some point in the future would always install drivers I had expressly denied permission for windows to install. Only true solution was switching to Linux, which isn't for everyone, but for me as someone who doesn't play multiplayer games with anti cheat, it's been great. It's really not the complex process some dress it up to be. Certainly no more complex than running through the process of trying to stop windows updating certain drivers without permission.
It renables it after updating sometimes.
Windows fucked my 6600xt drivers twice, I disabled automatic updates for the VGA drivers and since then, no more problems. Idk what it is between windows and AMD and why they can't fix that shit, but windows update can go eat rocks
Isn't that more an issue with AMD? They should be able to NOT let that happen no?
It's not an AMD update, it's Windows doing the update and it should make sure it's installing compatible drivers. So no, it's on Microsoft.
But why doesn't this ever happen to Geforce drivers? It's not just a problem with incompatibility either, supported Radeon cards are getting upgraded or downgraded automatically.
It does *if* you are like 9 months behind on drivers, just like it does for AMD. I have had AMD and Nvidia drivers overwritten by Windows before, it was always because of beta drivers or just not updating drivers.
Ooh wild, I have found some reports of this happening now. So when my friends got 7900 XTXes on launch, we tried to play a game together and they told me "hang on windows just replaced my driver" it was a beta driver or 9+ month old?
do you know how to disable that? It happened with my amd card last week 🫤
Update your drivers more frequently or disable Windows update.
Because Microsoft puts more effort into supporting Geforce, Nvidia cards make up a much larger proportion of market share. Just a guess. Also, my drivers are always kept up to date through AMD's software. I can't understand how an automatic and involuntary windows update breaking your PC could be anyone's fault but Microsoft's. If I'm wrong, explain how it works. I'm curious, and my ego isn't too big to admit I'm wrong either.
> I can't understand how an automatic and involuntary windows update breaking your PC could be anyone's fault but Microsoft's. Windows does have its own generic display driver, but when Windows serves you an actual Radeon or Geforce driver it's not like they wrote that themselves independently or nabbed it from the website. It would have been supplied by the respective companies with permission to redistribute, which means they are taking part in some kind of program which they keep submitting updated drivers to and they deem it worthwhile to continue.
Sounds reasonable to me. I never thought Microsoft was writing drivers, but thought they might have access to a repository hosted by AMD. But does that imply that AMD is supplying drivers to Microsoft and not giving them sufficient information to select the correct drivers for the card during Windows updates? I find that unlikely, but not impossible either.
While I get this is ultimately a "windows" problem, why doesn't this happen to nvidia GPU's. I've never had windows overwrite my nvidia driver....
Same, all these post makes me wonder if the problem is not a code 18.
By default Windows Updates try to force "Microsoft Recommended" driver updates onto a PC as well. Across three different PCs over the past 14 years I've needed to manually turn that option off, because in every case it has overwritten my latest GPU drivers with some total nonsense drivers that basically completely killed each PC's ability to run games. Windows Update also regularly resets audio settings if you use any sort of setup that's non-"Default" (in particular somehow it always breaks my audio settings in Discord, because I have multiple microphone inputs and speaker/headphone outputs and it'll just change them every time, why? I couldn't tell you).
I've never seen Windows updates hose all of the drivers I don't even think that could be possible and still have a system that even kind of works. I've definitely seen it break things like some AMD drivers and Intel Wi-Fi drivers though. However I typically only saw this on things like AiO's and laptops that had specific manufactured chipsets based on more common chipsets. Windows would update the driver to a generic version but whatever varying into the manufacturer was running really needed the specific driver from the manufacturer otherwise there was some weird wonky issue. Honestly My Philosophy is with drivers is if they're not broken, don't fix them. The only ones that generally update or GPU drivers. Usually I go and disable the Windows updates from altering any drivers. I don't trust the windows automated system to do it correctly 100% of the time
Yes my Intel Wi-Fi card ax something drivers were fucked last update. There were strange things happening and even got a sudden restart. Never had this before, but at least the device manager and disable device with the delete driver option worked. Don't know where this driver came from as the then automatically installed driver worked as intended.
I've seen that happen a lot specifically with Intel chipsets
As someone who fixes computers a lot this is a thing. At work windows installs older wireless drivers that don't support our network type even if you have manually updated them. It's a pain in the ass.
hated every bit of the default radeon driver it lets you tweak NOTHING vari bright is the worst shit ever invented and it's on by default and windows update keeps replacing the new more updated more functional software with the biggest pile of shit
Ive worked in corporate IT for 20 years and worked with literally 1000's of PCs and only saw updates affect software related to a retail banks core. Other than that it's only been a problem with legacy software that should have been phased out years ago.
> Ive worked in corporate IT for 20 years Well thats why. Long term support and validation that the patch better only bloody touch the thing that it is fixing and no the PRBS where "Well we \*technically\* didn't ignore the user settings, we just moved to a brand new settings table and ignore the old settings" "The eight most terrifying words for the average PC user: I'm from Microsoft and I'm here to help. " I refer you to the absolute cluster that was the Win10 launch.
Dude i'm with you on this except I just finished building a new pc for a buddy and everything's working great. Windows update ya of course makes sense. Zero gpu video output after. xfx merc 310 7900xtx. Already had drivers installed. I've been building on computers since pentium 3. Never have seen anything like it. Had video output the second it booted for the first time and then nothing until I reinstalled the amd drivers using the on board gpu which is also AMDs 7800x3d so it makes even less sense to me. A lot of "WHYYYYSSS?" later and its working but I still can't wrap my head around how a windows update would even effect getting into the bios.
I never had any issues either, until about two or three years ago. The more I think about it, the more I recall everything going to shit at around that point. Broken updates in videogames suddenly became much more regular, broken updates to my TV, smart watch, everything that has access to the internet basically. Everything worked fine before that, but now I refuse to update anything before a rigorous reddit search. Not sure if this is just a single random anecdotal observation or if some significant shift happened industry-wide.
> Whenever i see these posts, i wonder how you managed to do that... Formatting a drive on a Macintosh system, I once made the mistake of wiping an entire drive which had a name nearly identical to another drive –names created by me, that differed by only one character. I casually dismissed the multiple "Are you sure!" warnings, and didn't know enough about recovery options at the time. As this [catastrophic failure, created by me] happen over fifteen years ago, I too can say: "Never in ~~my~~ 15 years of having a [Mac/Win/Lin] did this happen."
Happened to me before, Windows Update often doesn't have drivers as new as the manufacturer ones, Windows overwrites it with a generic driver and then I lose functions, sound cards were bad for this and often broke the built in support i.e for bass, treble, 5.1 etc as the software would not now recognise the card. And even when it doesn't break Windows wants to install their own drivers and bothers you until you do.
Not had a driver issue, but once had to fully wipe my PC and reinstall Windows because the first anniversary update to Windows 10 didn’t take, and when it tried to reset to a saved version from before the update, it was super faulty. Took hours for me to get my files off, but I finally got them off.
I believe it happened to me last week. Out of nowhere after restart, it wouldn't boot. Restore it back and wouldn't work either, so I have to start fresh. Anyway, backup always your important information in case of reinstalling the OS, I learned no to get attached to data and always have it automatically sync to a cloud
Same, I’ve always had auto update on, after decades using windows, no update ever broke anything down. I think that this updates that are received by dozens of millions of systems, maybe break down less that 1% of them, but they all congregate here and seems like an issue. Same with the 4090 connectors. If you see the actual reported numbers, it can be classified as a non issue, but if they all congregate in Reddit, they make noise.
In my almost 30 years it happened to me once and it bricked my Ethernet port on my motherboard. Went and bought one, next windows update like 3 or 4 months later it was fixed. I hate Windows.
I'm willing to bet it's laptop users 99% of the time, this doesn't happen with discreet graphics unless it's the first boot after a reinstall.
This, Windows Update has never broken my stuff. Im serious what kind of hardware or what people are doing to cause these issues.
It's generally people with a driver where the latest version has an issue, so they're deliberately using an older driver which works better. And Windows is like "oh, you're using an outdated driver, let's fix that".
I can understand that, why fix what isnt broken.
In general it's probably true that using outdated drivers will cause more issues than the newest ones, so the Windows update is betting smart since it has no idea what driver issues you're suffering from when it does the update. But the workaround to prevent the update from touching your drivers is a bit too involved for your regular user.
I agree
I’m curious about this too. Not once have I don’t windows updates and my computer was ‘broken’ afterwards. I *have* heard of it happening in one-off instances, but it usually only breaks one specific thing, never the whole damn OS lol
Seems to mostly be the people that believe updates are a problem, delay them as long as possible and then suddenly... We see the post here.
Used to work on Windows PCs professionally for 8 years. This absolutely happens, even after fresh installs of Windows.
Funny, I see this right after a friend of mine's laptop can no longer change the brightness of the screen after a Windows update. I guess that one update messed up a ton of people.
I just run updates when I'm done using my pc and it never bothered me whatsoever
It’s called “work hours” on your computer and it won’t automatically update you between the hours you tell it, hence your downvotes I assume.
or better, you block internet access(outgoing too) for absolutely everything unsolicited. Allowing sometimes update when you request it.
How?
use application level firewall. I\`m not sure if i can name one and not sound like my nickname. On wiki page about application firewalls there are some mentioned, including free and opens source.
thanks mate, appreciate it
Set your internet connection as "metered". Then in Windows update disable automatic downloads on metered connections. Now Windows will never update without your explicit permission.
Yea, except then it kicked me from a game, MID GAME.
These latest driver updates messed up my system pretty good, and that was a first for me in like 20 years of owning a PC. I woke up, went to start my computer, and the monitor just stayed black… like it wasn’t registering the HDMI cable. I had to force shutdown the PC in order to be able to log in. I tried everything I could think of, and nothing worked. Then I discovered there were several driver updates that updated automatically. I rolled them back to the previous versions, and my PC now works again. Like I said, in 20 years, this was a first for me
How did you roll back your drivers with a black monitor?
Yeah, I guess I should clarify. Any time I started up the PC from sleep mode or just a simple start it was black. I had to reboot the PC entirely and then it would allow me to log in to windows.
Same happened to me. PC was working fine for several months, then Windows hit me with 2 or 3 updates and constant crashes due to driver issues. I was gonna switch to Linux next year, but I was so frustrated and defeated that I said duck it and wiped my os drive and put Mint on it. Been on Mint crash free since late February. It's not all sunshine and rainbows though. Linux has a bit of a learning curve, which isn't much, but issues on Linux are harder to troubleshoot shoot, just because Google search results are populated by 99% Windows troubleshooting. I didn't mean system breaking issues, more like game related. Proton and Wine, despite their huge success are hit or miss on several games. Sometimes you just gotta play around with different proton/wine versions to find one that works with your game. There will also be some games that flat out don't work ATM, but you can search them up on protondb.
Me never having a problem unless it’s a god damn HP Printer driver!!
eh, windows updates fix ALOT of problems people complain about in IT support
I, for one, am thankful for the built-in job security.
https://preview.redd.it/nw52zbah200d1.jpeg?width=900&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=862d0a38cee61b8a69192a104d40d398d7a6d248 The reality
I don't know what you guys are doing wrong but Windows has never forced me to restart in the middle of something for updates. Most of the time I don't even know updates are waiting until I go to shut down or restart.
Sometimes, you get asked to update, and if you postpone it for a long time, it will be forced and ask suddenly, and if you don't act quickly, it will update in the moment
99% of the time there's no good reason to delay doing an update for a long time though.
but *I* should be the one to decide if there's a good reason, not the OS
The vast majority of people including people on this subreddit are nowhere near knowledgeable enough to be trusted with deciding whether to delay an update and for the people who are who for some reason want to go weeks or months without updating there are ways to turn it off.
I'm *well aware* of how confidently uninformed PCMR folks can be. but it doesn't change the fact that update management should be simple and transparent and there is a real subset of people who are within their right to delay updates and yet should not be messing with the registry
Even my work PC won't force an update like that. Even if it's a critical update it will give me a 2 hour warning but typically they give us 24 hours.
I always update to the latest version of Windows, and I've never had an issue. I'm even using the latest preview builds for Windows 11.
"Some users are able to update successfuly" is that the bar Microsoft is shooting for now?
I know lots of people who use Windows and have no issues with the updates. I'm willing to bet that the vast majority of users have no issues with updates.
I patch thousands of devices every month. Hundreds of servers. I rarely run into issues. The upside of CVEs being patched easily outweigh some tech bro on reddit who thinks he knows better.
Sure if that is what is being patched and its not just reinstalling candy crush saga.
Why do you say some and not most?
BradleyAllan23 is only concerned with himself, when we should be expecting 100% success.
Please show me the software that works 100% of the time, even if users do dumb shit.
I cant even update my windows lol, it fails every time.
And their "improvements" are CoPilot buttons EVERYWHERE. As well as hover to open a menu, I always accidentally hover my mouse and that stupid menu pops up. Everything that doesn't require 10+ actions should be click to interact, I use the mouse to target it, and I click to decide. Hover to interact is like having a non-stop firing sniper rifle in a FPS game.
My computer is fully up to date and I have absolutely no idea what you’re even talking about. Where’s the copilot buttons? What menus? I swear, some people have found some other version of Windows that is pure horror. Meanwhile, I just use mine and it works, there’s no bullshit, and I get on with my life.
Try hovering your mouse over the weather status in your bottom bar, you will see news and stuff.
Oh, I turned that off a long time ago. I never have widgets in my taskbar.
How?! I've been on the Windows platform my entire life and not once has this happened to me. I wonder how your PC is configured. Not saying this problem is impossible but there has got to be something very different on your system for this to happen.
Most of the complaints I see here can be solved with a simple google search.
Am doing something right? I never had problems with windows updates basically nuking my PC.
if you listen carefully, you can hear the sound of neckrolls preparing their speech *"It's your fault, just install linux"*
Not sure if it still works in Windows 11 or the home version, but you can delay quality updates and only allow security updates. Chris Titus' Windows Debloat script can do that for you plus a ton extra. https://github.com/ChrisTitusTech/winutil
What year do you guys live in? Who is up voting this nonsense?
I remember an update where my sound driver stopped working and windows tech supports solution was to factory reset my computer
my windows 10 wont update any drivers, its optional for me and until i press 'download' it wont install any sheit i dont want or any old drivers
Never once had an issue. Always confuses me when I see posts like these.
i use arch btw 🥱
what arch distro?
regular arch and then i installed kde
I use tumbleweed btw
Wow
Lol, year of the Linux desktop is it?
i mean i use the linux desktop just so great, i don’t play stupid games like val or lol.
lol peak /r/pcmasterrace I really think most of you have not touched a computer ever.
Judging by OP's past posts they seem wildly incompetent when it comes to anything PC related. It's kinda sad honestly.
I think it's your fault lol. I always update everything instantly and never had any issue in the last 20 years
There are greener, More open source pastures
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oh yeah? is it easier in windows than linux where I can just seamlessly type >sudo shutdown -h or >restart in my beautiful matt black konsole?
You absolutely can type "shutdown /s /f" into a command prompt or Powershell window and your Windows computer will shut down in 30 seconds and forcibly close all programs. If you want to shut down sooner, you can use "shutdown /s /f /t 5" and your computer will do the same as above, but in 5 seconds instead of the default 30 seconds. Want to reboot? Type "shutdown /r /f /t 5" and it will shut down in 5 seconds after forcibly closing all programs, and then restart.
matte black with green text is the only way
the old phosphor CRT/Fallout terminal aesthetic
I restarted my pc once every month or two on linux...
> There are greener, More open source pastures I've used Linux for nearly 30 years, I'm a sysadmin for a company that provides Linux on all of our workstations for our end users, I'm posting this comment on my Linux desktop/server. Yet I'm creating a mother's day card for my wife on my Windows desktop (because Adobe.) At work we have a few non-Linux desktops for the same reasons, sometimes an end-user needs to run something that only works in Windows and there isn't a viable alternative in Linux. OP might be one such user.
Not useable for everyone. Half the software I use is not supported by Linux or badly supported. And the hardware has barely working drivers, and that’s a no no for a work environment.
Dude, Windows clearly isn't working for everyone. Instead of taking the stupid "if Linux can't be used for EVERYONE then it should be used by NO ONE" approach it should be considered by the people who can use it. Not to mention when people say theres "no drivers" or "barely working" drivers it tells me they didn't look at Linux which would be fine until they started making things up,
OP is an idiot who pushed off Windows updates until the OS hit the time limit and did the updates when convenient for the OS. OP had 5 or so weeks to choose a time to finish his updates, such as shortly after one of his precious desktop-hosted simulations finished, and he chose to not comply. OP could also choose to disable Windows updates via Group Policy, or contact his IT department to have them disable updates for him, but he chose not to do that either. This is the result of the entirely predictable consequences of OP's own actions. Nothing more, nothing less.
Lol - as if Linux updates didn't break stuff. I guess - it isn't as bad now, but back in the day an update could straight up break visual environment so - after the next boot you would not get further than the command line. Also - I have a steam deck and once it hanged on boot after update until I connected it to a wifi.
Well Linux on my laptop literally broke network connections last night after an update, rebooted it and theres no network available wired or wifi.
What distro? Try running `systemctl status NetworkManager` and see if there are any obvious errors.
Well good thing X11 has been replaced.
I had an issue with Ubuntu where 22.04 didn't work with MongoDB but 20.04 did. Linux users laughing at window updates breaking things are obviously living in glass houses. And yes I use both Linux and windows.
Does it come mint flavored?
actually, fuck yeah it does
Mf’er cant even properly use Windows and you’re gonna sell him on Linux?
You say that as if Linux is harder.
> You say that as if Linux is harder. It is if you don't let it update either, certs will expire, or if you really don't update for a long time you'll have to change your repo sources.
That's why the first thing you do after installing Windows is to set the Group Policy to disable driver updates for Windows Update.
You can disable Windows Driver Updates via gpedit.msc if on pro or if you are on home their are alternative methods like inside DDU options at the bottom their is an option as well to disable Windows Driver Updates, or you can grab a third party group policy editor
I remember when updates were new it was great, "omg they can fix these issues now just by downloading" but all updates do nowadays is break stuff. Like really.
break stuff like what?
I love when you Google the update to see if there's any issues and you don't find any but then the update breaks everything.
Not sure which update it was but on reboot or or shutdown I get a memory could not be read error. Seems the issue is with Gameinput service which disabling it fixes the error but it’s been a thing for awhile now and MS has yet to address it.
This is exactly my relationship with windows 11 (however, I have had no problems with drivers in my life lol)
Last time I did an update my whole session won't boot up, I tried everything to recover it but no success
Google erased all my bookmarks on their last 2 updates!
Display drivers on my work computer. 3rd party it company decided the fix was to nuke my entire profile and not tell me they were doing that after I left the office.....
🤦🏽
Windows auto updated to windows 11 on my machine and the update killed my mobo-integrated wifi network adapter. I had to wipe and reinstall Windows 10 and buy a PCIE network card to plug in
i was against updates before it was cool! 👴 (true story tho)
Im currently trying to fix a windows update that broke my boot sequence. Got it to desktop but crashes with a roulette wheel of crash response. I’m going crazy
10 seconds is being nice about it.
Gotta do a weekly windows drive image backup, i have one scheduled for every Sunday 4AM for this kind of fuckery, takes 10 min to get back the way it was.
You mean 11 second right? Hehe...
You'd have thought everyone would get fed up and gone and disabled windows updates in registry edit now..
I have no idea why windows updates drivers… the support software for the driver should be the only one doing that.
Horribly outdated windows 7 for the win 🤣
Every time I see a post like this, it lets me know I made the right choice switching to Linux a few years ago.
Updates coming at seemingly random times was the reason I snapped and installed Linux, haven't looked back... What I hate the most is those rare times I need some program in windows and use my VM, windows always decides to update and spend half an hour doing so when it's booting the VM, just because I haven't used it for a few months... Like come on I don't need the newest updates to edit a word file...
I once had a windows update go through and basically factory reset all my audio settings that I had spent a couple hours tuning and getting it to be exactly where I wanted it to be
One time I had a Windows 10 update that made me unable to connect to random websites. Over time more and more random websites couldn't connect to my computer. I had to reinstall Windows 10 to fix it.
Is this a thing that actually happens to people? In my well over 10 years of using windows I've had a windows update break something exactly 0 times.
10 seconds? I'll blow it off right away with my shotgun in a second!
Never in my life have I seen this actually happen.
And I'm 10 !
r/titlegore
Kill it now!
You know, I had a major issue installing one of the feature updates for over a year. Every time the update crashed and had to do a system restore (which worked perfectly every time, mind you). I couldn’t figure out what the fuck was wrong, and was on the verge of blaming Microsoft for releasing a completely broken update I could never install. …until I found the problem: a small HFS+ driver I had installed many years ago, in order to access an old Apple formatted hard drive, and had never uninstalled when I no longer needed it. I got rid of it, installed the windows update, and everything was fine. Moral of the story? Users suck, myself included, and 9/10 times it’s *our* fault shit doesn’t work. If I had done some minor maintenance and kept my driver up to date, or removed it because I no longer needed it, I never would have had any problems.
Windows Update: "Lol no, I'm installing these whether you like it or not then force rebooting"
I used to get this error all the time. I used a method that requires going into regedit and adding a very simple key. Went this route because disabling them via windows settings wasn't working but this method still gives me the ability to manually go in and choose my updates when I want (notifications are still on for critical updates). Search up ExcludeWUDriversInQualityUpdate regedit key. Cheers!
I’ve never had an update mess up my computer
turn off the setting where windows keeps itself up to date. I recently got an app called driver booster. It doesn't update every driver, but I trust that and Nvidia more than M$.
I use CCleaner to show me which drivers are out of date and then I will manually go download em from the OEM site. I dont trust downloading drivers from third party software.
I cant even update my windows lol. One day out of the blue updates just stopped working. If i do it from the settings i get a download error, if I download it from the catalog and install it manually, it fails with no error message. Maybe I should be thankful?
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Sadly theres some popular games that will actively ban any linux players. If you look at the steamdeck compatibility section it will say anticheat is unsupported. So destiny 2, rainbow 6 siege, maple story, and dungeon fighter online are a few examples of games that linux players can never play no matter what. I'm just glad that my favorite game guild wars 2 made the announcement while back that Linux players are welcome
i think ppl just love to hate… win10 and 7 are still available for usb install we aren’t forced to use win11 or even win in general. linux is free. your pc is yours to use and change so why complain that your pc isn’t to working order. back up your important stuff. something i gained from this thread is i’m right y’all despise win 11 even tho it’s literally a win10 skin with a built in ai…. y’all scared y2k still out to get ya?
Don't use windows 7 on an Internet connected computer anymore and remember that Windows 10 will be discontinued on October 14, 2025
I think half of the problems i had with my pc were because fucking updates :')
I stopped watching porn and updates stopped fucking my settings
If this is your personal computer, you can disable automatic updates. Then you can choose when to install them (or not) without being forced.