Turns out there IS an XKCD for everything...

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blackbrandt

That Darn College Student
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Well, I spent the evening figuring out one heck of a Windows... umm, "feature". (I hate Mac OS, and I'm having a bit of trouble getting Ubuntu to dual boot due to Lenovo's recovery partitions on my hard drives, so I'm stuck with Windows 10 for now).

I swear to god... every word of this is true.

So... I got a notification today to update my driver for my nvidia 960M graphics card. I attempt to install it, but it gives me an error, so I hit "revert" or whatever and just undo it. I figured I'd get to it later.

Fast forward a few hours.

I'm having severe trouble connecting to the internet. Checked with a personal hotspot from my phone. Definitely computer-side (not our wifi). A bit of thinking, and I realized that the failed install of the driver more than likely broke my Intel wireless card. Long shot, but it's the only setting I had changed on my computer in the last few hours.

OK, so I reboot....which resulted in a BSOD. Weird. Never seen that error code before. Did a bit of research and figured out it was a driver issue....
This is where it really starts to get weird.

Did a bit of thinking/googling. The solution I ended up coming up with ended up fixing it.

I booted into safe mode (that was an adventure in itself, trying to get through all of the Windows crap to find a "boot in safe mode" option) uninstalled the intel driver and the nvidia driver (which ODDLY enough, ended up actually doing some sort of partial install), and rebooted. Goal was for Windows to reinstall the drivers. I did this through device manager in safe mode, and both of them had an error code next to them when i went to uninstall them.

I reboot. Still doesn't work. (By the way, at this point, the computer was also taking about 5-10 minutes to power down. I have an SSD. This shouldn't take this long.)


I boot back into safe mode. I keep skimming through and see some other devices in DM have an error next to them. Two fo themd eal with the fact that booting into safe mode disables them. But the one that bugged me was the PnP monitor Driver. I try uninstalling that and rebooting back into regular Windows.

Completely works.



After I got my computer working, I thought of the following XKCD comic. It was extremely relevant in this situation. I do believe my computer needs an exorcism.

Bug.png
 
I would strongly recommend using Nvidia's video driver versus the Windows drivers. Same for the wifi, sound, system board etc.
 
I would strongly recommend using Nvidia's video driver versus the Windows drivers. Same for the wifi, sound, system board etc.

+1

I see more problems with MS "certified" drivers than the ones on the manufacturers sites. Having said that Nvidia is notorious for installing a bloatware, so I would perform an interactive update and deselect everything not required. I usually only install the basic driver itself.

Also in some cases the driver updates have to be performed in conjunction with firmware updates, so you really have to pay attention to the release notes.
 
Well, I spent the evening figuring out one heck of a Windows... umm, "feature". (I hate Mac OS, and I'm having a bit of trouble getting Ubuntu to dual boot due to Lenovo's recovery partitions on my hard drives, so I'm stuck with Windows 10 for now).

If you want to use Linux, delete any recovery partitions on the machine. Windows 7/8.x/10 needs two primary partitions to install/run (system reserved (about 100MB) and one for everything else). Any others can be safely nuked. If for some reason, you want to reinstall Windows back up any recovery partitions before deleting them. IMO, quality control on Windows Updates has really gone downhill since last March.
 
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Being a "professional " in the field, personally I find an OS to be an OS. They all have technical, application, utility, and security challenges. Pick the one you like and stick with it. I use Windows as it meets my application needs, and I can manage the security risks.
 
Being a "professional " in the field, personally I find an OS to be an OS. They all have technical, application, utility, and security challenges. Pick the one you like and stick with it. I use Windows as it meets my application needs, and I can manage the security risks.

+1 on what Al said. All have good and bad. It is a matter of picking what you like/need, and managing the risks.
 
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