Hidden driver update keeps returning

Good morning, tenors,

I have an HP 10-e, basically a nice touch screen netbook. It was designed for Win 8, and took the upgrade to Win10 very nicely, except for the display driver. The notebook began to perform very sluggishly once I had completed all the updates. In task manager I saw that the System process was taking up about 30% of the CPU constantly.

I traced the problem to the AMD display driver (machine has an A4-1200 cpu). I uninstalled the device and its driver, and everything was perfect again. I then ran the update hider utility, and thought my problem would be over. But it returned.

So I uninstalled the driver again, then ran the update hider, and now it said there were no updates to hide. I thought, ok, the last unwanted driver install must have been in the pipeline before I ran the hider, but this time my previous block has taken effect. To be sure, I checked for any updates, and there were none. I thought I had beaten the problem.

But today I started the machine, and watched as the driver install module labored to install a large driver. Sure enough, my nemesis is back, destroying the usability of the machine.

Frankly, the lack of end user control in Win10's update scheme is a scandal.

But anyway, how can I prevent the AMD driver from updating?

BTW, I have looked for a better AMD driver, and have found none any better for this machine. The generic MS driver works well, if I could only only keep it.

dalchina said:

Some updates to programs and more are not handled by Windows Update, but by, e.g. their own scheduled task, or on lauch of the program.
Are you certain the driver update is attributable to Windows driver update?
You do actually have to positively hide it. And you can't necessarily expect the update to be delivered when you scan for it.
For example, I rolled back my Synaptics driver which had been updated. Scanning for the update over several days showed nothing. Then it was updated again.
MS's premise is the continual delivery of trouble-free updates - however underlying this, is the idea that Home users are a test bed for business (Pro) and Enterprise clients.
Identify the mechanism and block it- which should be relatively easy if it's not Windows Update based.
(Is there any 'check for update' option in any AMD control GUI)?

I just found an entry in task scheduler that looked like an update checker. But it disappeared when I uninstalled the driver again. So I don't see any vector but MS Updates for this problem. And I definitely recall the driver being installed by MSU initially.

I'm not sure what you mean by "positively hide it". The hider utility is the only way I know of, and it's not detecting the driver for some reason (though I'm almost certain it initially did).

I guess it's too much for MS to put a check box next to updates in MSU for hiding them permanently, because they want to control what goes into the machine. Unfortunately in this case, they are rendering a nice piece of hardware useless.

Tried disabling the driver in Device manager?
Or
Getting the driver from AMD which according to Google does or should work in Win10 with that laptop
Or
Tried using a win8.1 driver.

dalchina said:

"positively hide it"
- the driver is displayed when you scan for it and then you hide it
compared to
- the driver is not displayed when I scan for it
Your problem with avoiding a driver update is not unique. Occasionally in updating from one build to another a low level driver needs to be 'borrowed' from the previous build. But then, people do seem to think that their PC- however old- should be able to run any build.

I'm sorry, I'm still not following you on "positively". You mean in task manager, scanning for hardware changes?

True enough, no one owes me anything. But most hardware suppliers have made an upgrade path to Win10. In this case, AMD has not. The HP site also only lists Win8 drivers.

Meanwhile, perhaps I have found a solution. Instead of uninstalling the hardware and its driver, I Disabled it. The machine immediately went back to purring along nicely, and in the past Disabling has been persistent.

Scanning for changes brought no change. Nor did Windows Updates. Trying a reboot now, but I think I've got it solved.

The solution survived a reboot and WU check.

clam1952 said:

Tried disabling the driver in Device manager?
Or
Getting the driver from AMD which according to Google does or should work in Win10 with that laptop
Or
Tried using a win8.1 driver.

Sorry, I missed your post. Yes, disabling it seems to be the best solution. I tried all the other ideas (though I don't think HP offers a win8 driver for it now; I could be wrong). Thanks.