Hi,
I’m currently looking at an ASUS ProArt B550-CREATOR motherboard in my quest for checking out nice APU-only system configurations.
Everything is seemingly working fine, except you have to disable Windows 10’s automatic driver installation via Windows Update in gpedit.msc since you cannot prevent it from forcing a GPU driver from May 2020 onto the system that leads to BSoDs.
But even after letting Windows do its drivers rampage without intervention it doesn’t change a thing about an unkown device remaining in Device Manager even after seemingly all drivers have been properly installed:
Yeah, it seems the “ASUS Armoury Crate” UEFI switch is broken meaning it cannot be turned off.
Tried the inverse to “Have you tried turning it off and on again”, meaning unplugged the ethernet cable and turned ASUS Armoury Crate as well as MyASUS on.
This results in two unkown devices, disabling MyASUS lets one disappear and disabling ASUS Armoury Crate doesn’t do anything at all.
Do you have a contact at ASUS to properly report this to to not have to go through the ever soul-grinding experience of Level 0 end customer support?
Here you go: Microsoft Update Catalog.
Enable insecure downloads in your browser, download, extract, the use the manual driver update option in Device Manager.
If you are doing the same testing as me, for me the source of the BSoD was pretty obvious:
Installed Windows 10 21H1 with an USB stick (via Rufus) with an ISO itself created with Microsoft’s public Media Creation Tool and used the command line parameters to create one for Enterprise (Enterprise and Education are the only Windows 10 editions I touch due to GDPR concerns).
Ethernet ports are not connected to not be forced to create a stupid Microsoft online account. I install all available Windows Updates offline, then all drivers with their most-recent release.
So the OS is fully installed and all hardware drivers present, then I connect an ethernet port and Windows automatically downloads and installs an ancient AMD GPU driver (as initially mentioned dated May 2020) while the most recent AMD GPU driver from May 2021 is already installed.
In my case this leads to BSoDs, the only way to avoid it is to disable Windows’ automatic driver installation via gpedit.msc, the option that is available in the GUI has no effect, Windows keeps downloading and installing that old driver.
Just click limited setup twice to avoid Microsoft account, that has been my experience on pro versions
You’re ancient GPU driver problem has been off and on plague of windows update, I’ve had them do boot loops before, as far as I’m concerned is only slightly more Microsoft’s fault forcing the bad drivers than AMD’s for making them that bad in the first place
There are “rumors” that even with Pro editions that will sometime soon no longer be possible so I just disconnect all network interfaces to be on the safe side.
It’s not a rumour. Unless you are offline you no longer have the option to do a limited or non-MS account with a new Win 10 setup. It gets so much better each and every update too; your user will be prompted to change their account to an MS linked one - fortunately that can be cancelled out, for now
IIRC it has been this way since after 1908
I always forget and have to redo the setup with no LAN connection to bypass this as well. I have experienced this on both Pro and Home editions.