Vista Reboot Madness!

It’s madness, I tell ya! Shear madness!

Recently, I installed one of the myriad nVidia display drivers for Windows Vista (rev. 158.24 to be exact) and within 24 hours the operating systems was forcibly “downgrading” my XPS M1710 notebook to an older, WDM-certified version. Worse still, it did this without my consent, courtesy of the new, more aggressive Windows Update.

The final straw came today when, in an apparent fit of over-protectiveness, Vista decided to perform the downgrade – 4th time in as many days – while I was in the middle of constructing a complex web query. Suddenly, all of my applications started shutting down. I then saw the familiar “Installing Updates” message as Vista completed the “downgrade” and rebooted the machine.

Bottom Line: It’s the middle of the workday and my PC is rebooting on its own, without so much as a warning dialog, all because Vista can’t recognize the installed video driver. This is nuts!

I finally stopped the cycle (but not before it tried again, this time causing a blue screen of death – grrr!) by reinstalling the new video driver and then manually checking for new updates via the Windows Update control panel applet. As expected, up popped the “Important” (per Microsoft’s assessment) nVidia driver “downgrade,” only this time I unchecked its entry which should (hopefully) keep Vista from attempting another install. I also right-clicked the entry and told Vista to “Hide” it from any future update cycles.

In this age of zero-day exploits I can understand Microsoft’s desire to push truly important updates out to its customer base. After all, most of us are too lazy to maintain proper patch protocol. However, device drivers – which are often the source of unexpected and unforeseen conflicts – should be excluded from these automated, reboot-incurring cycles.