Which drivers do you update manually?

[Danielo290881]

Hi,
sorry for my bad english, i hope you understand it anyway.
I want to know which drivers you are updating manually. I have updated the intel graphic driver to 10.18.10.3621 after the July Firmware Update manually (and after that i deactivated the Firmware Update cause it recognized i ve got another graphics driver)
But there are other drivers outside which could be newer as pre-installed on Surface Pro 3.
I've seen that the Intel SATA AHCI Controller is driver version 9.4.0.1023. I think it could be updated to 13.1.0.1058 with original Intel Driver.
Intel Management Driver could even be newer than on Surface Pro 3 preinstalled.
What do you think absout updating some drivers manually? Which one did you update ? Do you know a trick that we don't have to deactive any firmware update after we installed newer drivers on our surface as from Microsoft delivered?
Thanks and with best regards
Daniel

 

[ctitanic]

I wonder how Surface PRO owners have been handling this. Drivers are being released by Intel first. If you install them manually will that break Windows update?

 

[leeshor]

Interesting question begs an interesting story. I have owned my own computer business since 1989. We don't like to update anything unless it's the last week or the first week of the month. We have pretty much tried to skip the optional updates for several years unless there was a good reason to install them.

Quite a few years back my assistant and I were updating what we thought were drivers that had been posted for at least a week on 14 systems for a customer. At the time their Internet connection was very slow by today's standards so we made the rounds starting the downloads and got to the last system before we were called to the first one with a crash after restart. About the time we got to that system 8 more systems had been restarted and all crashed. (No, I won't tell the rest of the story other than to say we found that one of the driver updates was at fault). My best suggestion is to let someone else be the guinea pig. But that's just me.

I support so many systems that I can tell when Microsoft has released a faulty patch. (not entirely their fault). The second Wednesday of the month, first thing in the morning, I start getting phone calls. There are reasons to install the driver from the manufacturer, in some cases, but I would at least prefer to wait for Microsoft to do as much regression testing as they can logically do before installing them. Many of the problems with the patches only affect a small number of people and is dependent on the other software installed on the system. Some Intuit product, for example, can lead to DLL hell in a heart beat.

In the case of the Nvidia Quadro cards we use a lot of the most recent factory reference drivers work best for dual monitor and Microsoft drivers for single monitor. Go figure.

 

[ctitanic]

I'm 100% with you!

 

[leeshor]

It may seem I was being harsh but with 600 systems to support it can be a real problem. The IT director for one of my customers used WSUS to push updates to over 100 systems he supports in-house, at the start of the last week of the month, including, (select), drivers. It took him 2 weeks to figure out which of the updates caused his entire network to slow down. He began by thinking it was one of his switches until he realized it happened after the push.

 

[Danielo290881]

What i can tell is that if you install a driver manually which is included in the original surface pro firmware/hardware update package, windows update offers the older driver again.

But the graphics driver in the firmware package is really old, so i thought it would be better to install the new driver manually and deactive the firmware update (of Juli for exampale). Of course i have installed all other firmware drivers before.

 

[kontrol1]

I tried the latest graphics driver from intel to mess around with the color banding. It give all the intel graphics control options and such. I am able to alter the banding a bit but not able to get rid of it.

Going back to stock. Looks like gotta live with the color banding.