Windows 10 reverting monitor driver

[Julian]

I have the monitor driver that Windows thinks is the right one for my monitor but it's a disaster; it locks up my PC totally (first time that's happened for probably 20 years now!). I'm pretty convinced that the issue is to do with the PC either putting the monitor into or taking it out of sleep mode because every time I came and did the "mouse wiggle" to wake it up after the monitor had been put to sleep it didn't respond, the PC didn't respond to pings from another system either, and I needed a power cycle reboot to recover it. I've now set the power settings to never put the monitor to sleep and try to remember to switch the monitor itself off when I leave it for a while and I've had zero crashes since. (My PC has always had the power setting set to never sleep so it is only the monitor sleep behaviour that has been changed here.)

I could of course continue with this workaround but I'd rather get that bad driver off my system and the obvious thing to do seems to be to revert to the Windows generic PnP driver and take it from there but I can't work out how to do that. A driver rollback won't get me there because I've been through a few versions of the AOC driver (I have an AOC monitor) so I think a roll-back would just take me to one of those. Asking windows to search for a monitor driver in Device Manager comes back saying the driver I have is already the best and latest one so it never offers me the generic PnP one.

Is there somewhere I can safely download a generic driver from or get it some other way? Might I be able to simply uninstall the existing driver and Windows will install the generic one or is there a danger that I end up with a PC with no monitor driver and hence one that can't display anything? (When I first did the Windows install it installed the generic driver, my ill-fated experiments with AOC-specific drivers was from my downloading them from the AOC web site.)

- Julian

[Breelander]

A driver rollback won't get me there because I've been through a few versions of the AOC driver (I have an AOC monitor) so I think a roll-back would just take me to one of those. Asking windows to search for a monitor driver in Device Manager comes back saying the driver I have is already the best and latest one so it never offers me the generic PnP one.

You obviously know your way around Device Manager. Rather than asking Windows to search automatically for a driver, you should 'Browse my computer for driver software' then in the screen that follows 'Let me pick from a list of available drivers on my computer'. The Generic PnP Monitor should be in that list.

[XFool]

I have the monitor driver that Windows thinks is the right one for my monitor but it's a disaster; it locks up my PC totally (first time that's happened for probably 20 years now!). I'm pretty convinced that the issue is to do with the PC either putting the monitor into or taking it out of sleep mode because every time I came and did the "mouse wiggle" to wake it up after the monitor had been put to sleep it didn't respond

This may be far too simple but... when asleep my Dell won't respond to a mouse wiggle, because the power to the mouse LED has been turned off!

So you need to hit the keyboard - or possibly click the mouse, can't quite remember that.

[Infrasonic]

I have an AOC monitor and was having intermittent mouse pointer lock outs and temporary black screen issues until a couple of weeks ago when I got an updated Intel graphics driver via my Lenovo Vantage software. Everything hunky dory now.


Previously I'd blocked W10 from updating specific printer drivers as it had got into a loop downloading and installing two, neither of which actually worked.
Can't remember how I did it (it wasn't regedit), it was via a Google search but Bree will probably know off the top of his head how to do it, it's been discussed before, maybe over on Ten Forums.

So I'm thinking if you get a working graphics driver installed, and then block W10 from overriding it, that might do the job?

[Julian]

Thanks all. Sorry for the slow reply. I got distracted by a few things.

I've reverted the driver back to the generic PnP (GPnP) one using Bree's tip and that was dead simple. Interestingly when I first installed Windows on this new Intel NUC the GPnP driver that it installed wasn't letting Windows see my HDMI monitor as an audio output device so I had to upgrade to an AOC driver but now, even reverted back to the GPnP driver, I do get sound and it is reliably sleeping the monitor and subsequently responding to a mouse wiggle to wake it up without a single PC lockup since rolling back the driver.

I am however back to another problem which I have had with every driver I have tried and some Googling tells me is also related to the sleeping and waking of the monitor. I think this one might be a graphics driver issue rather than a monitor issue because it was present with the GPnP and both of the AOC drivers that I tried so I probably need to hope that Intel fixes it and maybe file a support request. My AOC monitor is 3.5 years old now, and that's assuming it was new on the market when I bought it, so AOC don't seem to have released any specific updates for my model (an "AOC Q2770PQU 27" WQHD LED VGA DVI HDMI Monitor" in my case driven via an HDMI cable).

My problem is that when I do a mouse wiggle to get my monitor out of sleep mode all my open desktop windows have been resized (smaller) and stacked up in the left top corner of my monitor. Some research tells me that this is due to Windows (I assume via the graphics driver) misreading or failing to read the correct monitor resolution immediately after taking the monitor out of sleep. Presumably Windows sees or, in default of any actual reading perhaps defaults to, a much lower resolution than my actual 2560 x 1440 and so scrunches up the windows to make them fit in that imaginary resolution.

The other piece of info possibly related to this is that every few days I get a Windows 10 notification saying...

igfxEM Module

Optimal Resolution Notification

The optimal resolution is 5120 x 2880. Select this notification for more information.

My monitor is definitely 2560 x 1440 and that is what every setting I can find in the graphics setup has it set to so this would seem to be another issue with something in Windows not quite getting the right resolution properties from the monitor. My monitor is also visibly running at 2560 x 1440 at all times, it couldn't display as much info with text rendered in the definition that it is if it wasn't in that resolution. Selecting the notification has never given me more information as promised in the message above by the way, it just seems to dismiss the notification wherever on it I click.

It's definitely not a hardware issue with either cabling or the monitor itself because my previous Windows 10 system from a few months ago was plugged into exactly the same monitor via the same cable and didn't have this issue.

Any thoughts on how to fix this issue? It's not a critical issue but it is somewhat annoying.

The issue did also go away over the last week or so while I had the dodgy monitor driver installed and so had disabled the PC ever putting the monitor to sleep and was conserving power by explicitly switching the monitor on and off using the power button. During that time whenever I came back to my PC and switched the monitor back on the desktop was exactly as I had left it because the monitor never actually went to sleep. (Yes, that could/should be a workaround but I kept forgetting to switch the monitor off so I didn't always come back to an "ooh, I've switched on the monitor and it hasn't messed with my desktop" moment, half the time I came back to an "argh, I forgot to switch off the monitor and it's been on for the last 10 hours" moment instead which on balance was more annoying than the Windows resizing thing.)

- Julian

[bungeejumper]

Strewth, that sounds like a lot of work just to get a picture. I can remember getting my 1983 Dragon 32(**) out of its box and plugging the coax cable into the back of the telly, and away it went. It's good to know that Microsoft are still doing their bit for needless job creation.

BJ

(**) Okay, it wasn't actually a Dragon 32, it was a 1983 Camputers Lynx - with fine pixel management in 64 colours! It would have been a far better computer if only it had sold enough machines to make it worthwhile for somebody to write some blinking software for it. Rats, rats, rats, rats, rats, rats.