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TL;DR: Microsoft updates break drivers, make unbootable. Hours wasted. Such rage.

Lol. I come home, try booting my windows desktop. Need desperately to play some videogames. Power is on. Monitor lights up. Bios splash. Windows startup spinner.

Suddenly, windows startup spinner gone, monitor shuts off. Wait 5 minutes, no change. Force power off and reboot, same behavior.

Google says it's probably a bad video driver. I don't remember installing any in the last month, but heck I don't use this computer for shit outside of games, so may as well do a full OS reinstall and hope the problem drivers are gone.

Reboot and force power off halfway through boot to let windows know something's wrong next boot. Literally no other way to get to alternate boot methods.

Run the reset. First time, percent-counter starts. I leave the room at 30% to go get a sandwich. Come back and it says it's "undoing changes". Something went wrong and I have no way of knowing what.

Oh well, I'll just try again and see what the problem was. NOPE! Completes windows reinstall without a hitch on the second attempt.

Okay, now let's get my stuff back on here. First things first, Microsoft updates for my processor, graphics card, "security". Halfway through the updates, monitor shuts off and I'm back to square one. IT WAS THE MICROSOFT DRIVER, NOT THE ONE FROM NVIDIA GEFORCE EXPERIENCE!!!!

Fucking Microsoft. To all ye who rail against Linux as a gaming platform because of its unstable drivers, observe here the stupidity of Microsoft and weep.

Comments
  • 2
    Its kinda funny because linux actually has semi decent drivers now. I've never had something like that happen in the last 4 years on linux. Had it happen multiple times on windows though.
  • 1
    Update: woohoo! It happened to the other windows computer in my room, the one with the GTX 1080. It doesn't turn off the monitor though, just fills it with black pixels.
  • 7
    Update 2.0: I am so stupid!! The video cable was loosely plugged to my monitor, so not all pins were properly contacted.

    The reason the updated drivers broke things is that Windows defaults to a driver that can handle certain pins being unavailable. Namely, I suspect, the pins that allow it to find out what resolution the monitor has. (The default driver has 800x600 fixed resolution)

    So, reinstalling windows caused it to revert to this driver, which caused the *appearance* of fixed graphics. Reinstalling the more featureful but more brittle NVIDIA driver caused the *appearance* of breaking the drivers again.

    There is still nothing wrong with gaming on Linux! Linux gamers shall have their day! Mark my words!!
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