Is Windows 10 so broken it kills hardware?

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I was on 1803 Enterprise approx 2 weeks ago and applied some updates, after the reboot my rig was crawling, so I rebooted again, still crawling, just not as slowly as the previous boot. Anyhow, I went into device manager to find that somewhere around 5 drivers had disappeared….

I tried to get Windows to update them, I was met with “There is no driver selected for the device information set or element.” I tried a few times on each of the devices to no avail. Did some web crawling, couldn’t find much other than Microsoft’s generic faux tech support.

So, I just went ahead and upgraded to 1809… after which some of these devices found and installed drivers after a manual check, which included a Chipset driver. magically the rig sped up again! But, there was still 2 devices throwing the error:

A Liquid Cooler and low and behold a PCI Simple Communications Controller (which has appeared with no driver in previous Windows updates blunders), the PCI SCC turns out to be the Intel ME which I have disabled in my BIOS. I am currently still unable to update these device drivers.

The latest problem I have is that my GPU seems to have been killed off and I’m trying to determine if it’s Windows or Nvidia at play here. GeForce Experience updated my GPU driver from 417 to 425 Thursday night. I shut down the rig and went to bed. The next day after work I booted up and tried to play a game. I was met with artifacts and a message from Windows informing myself that it had blocked the program from accessing the hardware.

The drivers would not uninstall naturally, so I cleaned out the drivers in Safe Mode and reinstalled the previous. Booted back into normal mode. Ran the program again, met with same blockage and artifacts. Repeated the cleaning process. Installed driver again.After POST and the Windows boot logo I lose VDU signal. Repeated cleaning process. Did not install a driver and I get to the desktop. Tried to install a driver again, lose VDU signal again. Opened the tower and I could have fried an egg on the Backplate of the GPU. The fans were not running! Shut it down. Allowed to cool. Rinse and repeat. Artifacts in Safe Mode now also. GPU is damaged no doubt. I’m currently dealing with the Card and Chipset manufacturer regarding this, but it all seems a little eerily coincidental, especially after checking on here last night and seeing  a user with IME issues and MS-DEFCON 1….

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woody

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It would help to know which 1803 updates (CUs) you applied and what Build of 1809 you upgraded to.
Also the specific specs on the hardware that took the hit.

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woody

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Our two 1803 PCs—Home & Pro—updated fine 3 days ago. Also, I haven’t seen any mentions in general media, and even the sharp-tongued The Register is only talking about the AV problems with Sophos and Avast affecting Win 7/8. So it looks like there isn’t a widespread problem.

My guess is installing 1809 compounded whatever snag you hit with your 1803 update. In your situation, I would restore a disk image from before the 1803 problem and start again.

Advice: it sounds like you update drivers regularly. In short, don’t do that. It’s good practice not to update drivers unless you have a known specific reason.

If you must update one or more drivers, don’t get them from Microsoft except as a genuinely last resort. MS aren’t doing anything wrong, but they’re at the bottom of the driver supply chain and they’re supplying 85-90% of the PC world—so their offerings will be the most out-of-date and the most generic.

1st preference is the chip manufacturer, eg nVidia, AMD, Intel etc.
2nd preference is the card/device manufacturer, eg Gigabyte, ASUS etc.

Go to their sites and download the driver(s) you need.

Lugh.
~
Alienware Aurora R6; Win10 Home x64 1803; Office 365 x32
i7-7700; GeForce GTX 1060; 16GB DDR4 2400; 1TB SSD, 256GB SSD, 4TB HD

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