System timer - No drivers are installed for this device

Background

After having issues with recurring BSODs with error FAULTY_HARDWARE_CORRUPTED_PAGE, I took measures according to this page https://www.drivereasy.com/knowledge...ows-10-solved/. Apart from the Driver Easy software I also ran the Driver Booster software (https://www.iobit.com/en/driver-booster.php).

I updated approx. 15 drivers to the latest revisions. However, Driver Booster reports that all drivers are up-to-date, while Driver Easy reports that some drivers are outdated, one of them being the Intel(R) Watchdog Timer Driver (Intel(R) WDT). When viewing the details of this driver in Driver Easy it shows information according to the picture below:



As I understand it these drivers are both related to the System Timer driver in Windows Device Manager - System Devices. Looking at the Properties of System Timer in Device Manager it shows information as follows:


When downloading the Intel(R) Watchdog Timer Driver (Intel(R) WDT) with Driver Easy and trying to update the System Timer driver with the downloaded driver, Windows Update Driver reports that the best driver for this device is already installed, see pics below:



Questions

Why is Device manager reporting "No drivers are installed" while at the same time reporting Driver details of the driver installed, such as Driver version 10.0.15063.0? Is the driver installed or not???

Why is Driver Easy reporting that the driver needs to be updated, and providing a newer version, while Windows reports that the best driver available is already installed?


Any ideas that could bring some light upon these mysteries are much appreciated. Thanks!

dalchina said:

We never recommend the routine use of driver updating tools...

Thanks for the warnings! I'll be more careful when using these tools in the future.

Being a curious geek I read somewhere online that the watchdog timer driver is installed together with Intel XTU. I went on to check out XTU and installed it. After playing around with XTU for a while I ran a new scan with Driver Easy and discovered that it didn't complain about the "Motherboard resources"/"Intel Timer Watchdog Driver" issue anymore. Instead both the drivers seem to be installed now:



However, I still can't find the Watchdog Timer Driver anywhere in Windows Device Manager. I checked to see if I could find something regarding a watchdog timer in my BIOS settings but couldn't find anything. I checked out an interesting discussion on watchdog timers here: https://software.intel.com/en-us/for...t/topic/700408. However the discussion is a bit above my level of understanding. Is there perhaps no support for this in Windows, only in Linux?

Some useful papers I found:

https://www.intel.com/content/dam/ww...r-app-note.pdf
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/wind.../gg463320.aspx

dalchina said:

It's interesting that scan reports the System Timer as up to date...

Out of curiosity I ran DriverMax on mine (2 free/day / commercial) - I have used this 3 or 4 times over the years to find an odd driver not found in the normal way, and for that it has indeed been useful.

Of the updates it listed, none were timer related. But of course, the hardware is quite different.

However, Driver Easy produces a different list, including

I've executed a couple of scans now with some different driver tools: Driver Easy, Driver Booster, DriverMax and SlimDrivers. They all give different results on which drivers that are out-of-date. I have learned not to trust everything these tools detect. For instance DriverMax reports that my Dual Band Wireless driver is out-of-date:

However, checking with the download pages at Intel shows that I have the latest version: https://downloadcenter.intel.com/dow...?product=75439 .

I feel rather comfortable now with the drivers I have installed so I'll just wait and see if there will pop up any more BSODs. Thanks for all the help!

dalchina said:

Good lesson learnt.. hope all goes well.

Thanks, dalchina! I've now moved on to some more fun with VirtualBox, Windows XP and an old workshop information system for my car. The WIS doesn't run under 64 bit Windows 10 for some reason. I guess it only works for 32-bit Windows systems. Quite fun to run the old XP again

I just want to post a warning regarding SlimDrivers, which I downloaded from http://download.cnet.com/SlimDrivers...-75279940.html. My computer was infected with a plethora of malware, most of them related to SlimDrivers, something I detected today when performing a scan with Malwarebytes, an anti-malware software. One more lesson learned.