oh my GAWD W10 just updated my nvidia driver to the latest buggy one without asking. that's why the system went down earlier today
what the fuck. thought i had that shit disabled.
btw this is a manifestation of one of the most incredibly mind-bogglingly awful things about W10: microsoft has made it Extremely Difficult to ensure your system stays up for any amount of time
on any day you might return to your PC to find it at the log-on screen, your system having gone down at some point in the last however-long you were away to apply almost-unavoidable patches
i've heard of it happening when people are on their system doing work, and losing work. it's so fucked.
@alyx yeah this is actually awful and the way to prevent it isn't too intuitive
though I've never had it reboot in the middle of me actually being at the computer, it happens when I sleep usually
you can also set "Active hours" during which it will definitely not reboot for updates (for a maximum of 18 hours)
mine are set to 09:00-00:00
@staticsafe yeah, i've been around this block so that's why today's reboots surprised me
i had it licked on my last install, i think i ultimately disabled the windows update service. it still bothered me with an unavoidable pop-up windows 1-2 times a day, but at least it never installed anything until i told it to.
@staticsafe ALTHOUGH my "active hours" are set from 9 a.m. to 9 p.m. and this nvidia thing happened during the day. i have no explanation.
@alyx yeah I don't either
GPU driver updates don't even need a reboot on Windows so that makes it even weirder
like the nvidia installer just unloads the current driver and then loads in the new one
though I use GeForce Experience to update nvidia drivers, Windows Update doesn't touch those
@staticsafe no gfx driver reboot? that's weird to me, thought they were essential. but then i never did it through GFE, which i don't install since they made it more invasive last year
anyway, i clearly have some websearchin' to do
@alyx yeah you can try it by downloading the nvidia driver installer from their website and running it
it's kinda a impressive process
a word of warning though, I would close things like Chrome or Firefox that have GPU acceleration code before doing so as they don't react well to the driver just disappearing on them
@staticsafe my procedure is reboot to safe mode, run Display Driver Uninstaller, reboot, install from downloaded file before W10 goes and does something stupid
@staticsafe that's how the graphics otaku at guru3d always say you need to do it, anyway
as someone who's very anti-software cruft it feels right
@staticsafe oh just to be clear Display Driver Uninstaller is a third-party application, not the gfx driver's uninstaller
https://www.wagnardsoft.com/forums/viewtopic.php?f=5&t=925
it aims to obliterate everything before you add a new driver
@alyx that procedure shouldn't harm anything but it does feel a tad excessive
if you manually install a newer version of a driver over one that Windows provided, it knows not to touch it again