Intel HD Graphics Family Disabled By Windows 10

I upgraded a couple of Ultrabooks to Windows 10 in the last week and both displayed (sorry!) the same issue; the graphics driver was not working correctly. My Toshiba KIRAbook couldn’t share to an external display. My Lenovo Yoga S1 had the same problem.

I opened Device Manager and saw the above issue –  a yellow exclamation on the Intel HD Graphics device. Opening the properties revealed that:

Windows has stopped this device because it has reported problems.

Ah, so it appears that Microsoft shipped an untested driver for the most common graphics adapter in laptops and tablets. Is it any wonder that the likes of Samsung prevents Microsoft from updating their drivers?

FYI, Microsoft ships a lot of bad drivers and you should always get the device-specific drivers from the manufacturer of your device.

I checked for software updates from Toshiba and Lenovo and had none, so I went to the source. Intel has a set of drivers shared online. I downloaded “Intel® HD Graphics Driver for Windows® 10 64bit (3rd Gen & BYT)”, published on 7th August (hard to tell with you Americans and your non-standard date formats). I:

1. Downloaded the zip file
2. Extracted it to a temporary location
3. Ran the setup executable from there.

Trying to update the driver from Device Manager didn’t do anything – Windows claimed that the Microsoft driver was more up to date. It might be, but it’s sh1te. Running the setup program fixed the problem.

[Update]

Please read this follow up post on how to prevent installations of Microsoft-supplied drivers from Windows Update.

Note: I later did a clean installation on my Yoga after installing an SSD. The default driver from Microsoft actually worked out of the box. So there appears to be different behaviour on upgraded machines than on cleanly installed machines.

There’s no need to tell us if you saw no problems at all.