My AMD driver is randomly uninstalled by Windows Update

Back in september 2021, when I bought my laptop, I realized that bugs and drivers are not the exception, but the rule. Thankfully, I know a thing or two about computers so I can figure out fixes that common people wouldn’t, at least as long as the problem is not deeply incarnated in the OS’s internals.

My laptop is a Lenovo IdeaPad Gaming 3 15ARH05 (Type 82EY), with a 16 core Ryzen 7 4800H (with iGPU), GTX 1650Ti 4G, 16GB RAM, 512GB SSD, bought in the middle of the COVID-19 pandemic crisis with 763€, right after I finshed my first-ever job as a minimum-wage, overworked dish washer at a hotel complex, my worst so far. The laptop’s immediate purpose was to run Frostpunk, my beloved game, and secondly to run Visual Studio and virtual machines thoughout my 3 years of university.

Fast forward 4 years, and now I’m writing about two godawful things, one with a fix and the other enveloped in some kind of dark magic my mind can’t comprehend, but with a partial fix and some theories.

The driver issue

It’s the first thing that popped out when after I installed Windows 10 back then: AMD’s Adrenalin integrated GPU driver would randomly be uninstalled, sometimes while its process was still running if not after a restart¹. After some hours after I’d install the driver, my screen would flicker and clicking on the drivertray icon would pop up a message box saying that the Adrenalin driver process running wasn’t compatible with the driver that was installed on the system: image

Disclaimer: you might find better solutions on the internet nowadays. Next I’ll propose my experience and solution that I found with resources from 2021.

The cause: Windows Defender was uninstalling the newer version of the driver. At that time AMD said on their site to disable Windows driver updates, but that didn’t do anything to me. I needed the Adrenalin driver for its display color calibration settings: by default my screen’s color temperature is down low at 3000K, which is basically more yellow than the crusty 200-year-old varnish on a painting featured on restoration video.

Solution:

• download Microsoft’s Windows Update Show/Hide troubleshooter
• disable automatic updates in Windows Updates (you can enable them after this is finished)
• in Device Manager uninstall the AMD driver, it’ll be reverted to Microsoft’s default/universal iGPU driver (so don’t fear you’ll break something)
• now comes the guessing game:
  • the update won’t appear immediately in the troubleshooter;
  • you might want to clear the Windows Update cache (Windows/SoftwareDistribution) now, but this is just speculation; beware that deleting the cache after applying the fix will revert it!
  • when the troubleshooter finally lists the AMD’s update, ruthlessly click on that checkbox and save.
• now you can install your desired version of the driver

Although this is a fix, I remember it being reverted randomly once a year, maybe Windows Update clears its cache once a year, maybe not, but it’s beyond my paygrade to analyse this further.

The hardware (acceleration) issue

Second in line and that has to do with the silicon, maybe, is hardware acceleration randomly causing either a sudden short freeze and automatic restart, or an irevocable freeze that requires a hard reboot. In either cases no event log is registered, and few people on the internet seem to be in the same situation as me.

It’s one of my unsolved misteries that I fear it’s caused by a software-hardware fatal² combo for which I don’t posses the necessary knowledge, and nor it is critical enough to be worth the time³.

From my observations, the sheer randomness of the issue makes it a ticking timebomb, but thankfully it manifests once a month or more. When disaster strikes though, it is often while I do low-computational jobs: editing a txt, working in Visual Studio, but once it crashed while playing a game, so I can’t say it’s a specific program causing this. What’s worse is the second crash, where it just freezes the screen: if the browser plays music in the background, the last miliseconds in the audio buffer are replayed over and over.

Through our programmer glasses it’s evident that something is causing some kind of unrecoverable CPU crash; the above mention of the sound buffer being replayed indefinitely is surely a sign that the CPU doesn’t turn off the chip-enable signal of the DAC, but this is just speculation.

So far it might not sound like a hardware acceleration issue, but the same behavior increases in frequency when I enable HA in any app, be it browser or video players (VLC in my case), that’s why I disable it in all the apps that give an option to disable it; if it’s the same circuitry that causes the freezes/reboots when HA is disabled, I do not know.

I’d say I’m impressed that the manufacturers didn’t test for long-term issues like this, or they did and assumed users don’t care, either way I’m waiting for the day when I’ll comprehend even a tiny part of what causes this issue.

… And the stutters

Almost forgot about this one: I think my CPU is stuttering, or my clock chip, for 1-2 seconds my screen runs at 2 FPS and if audio is playing, the sound gets janky/slowed down. No event log is registered. These ones are not critical thankfully, and have a frequency of about one a month, still it intrigues me as I suspect this can be correlated with the HA issues.