Windows 10 April 2018 Update has started to roll out and some OEMs have updated drivers and other software for their hardware products to support it. If an updated driver is unstable or not working as expected, Windows 10 allows restarting it on the fly, without restarting the OS. Here is how.
Windows 10 comes with a special keyboard shortcut which allows restarting graphics drivers without ending your user session. The method supports NVIDIA, AMD, and Intel drivers.
To restart a video driver in Windows 10, do the following.
- Press the Win + Ctrl +Shift + B keys.
- The screen will go blank for a second and you will hear a beep.
- Everything will go back to normal immediately.
That's it!
The procedure is totally safe and won't affect your running apps and opened documents.
Later, you might want to get rid of the problematic driver in Windows 10.
A new version of a driver usually improves the functionality of the device and fixes issues which were present in the previous driver version. But sometimes, a newer version gives more issues with the device and might make it unusable.
In this situation, you may want to roll back the problematic device driver. It is possible to uninstall it and restore the previously installed driver, so you can wait for the next version of the driver to become available. Device driver rollback feature was introduced in Windows XP and has been included in every release ever since. See the following article:
How To Roll Back A Driver in Windows 10
If you have got a problematic driver from Windows Update, you might want to block Windows Update from installing the same version of the driver. Starting in Windows 10 version 1703, you can exclude drivers from Windows Update. A special option was added to Advanced Options of the Windows Update page of the Settings app. It is a welcome feature for many users who are not happy with new versions of drivers delivered through Windows Update in Windows 10.
See the article Exclude Drivers from Updates in Windows 10.
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It is nice to be able to avoid updating drivers, but it would be nicer to be able to see there is an update and decide if you install it or not, just like in Windows 7. It would be interesting to also distinguish important security updates in drivers from regular updates so you could decide to only update for security issues, or have some kind of label like Critical, recommended, etc.
It would also be nice if manufacturers stopped bundling all kind of useless bloat and telemetry in their drivers and keep it as simple as possible to avoid security/performance/privacy issues. When it comes to base OS functions, less is more.