oh boy everytime I did a driver update it usually does more damage than good.
PC keeps crashing, video files wouldn't play anymore etc.
If everything works fine, don't update it.

Oh I restarted it at least 5 times between steps, didn't help.

Same, hence my drivers were old and were the only thing left to try to get it to work.

I'll leave it on the driver that windows installed for now. It works, not worth risking breaking it again with the latest driver on the nvidea website. It baffles me that it can detect what gpu it needs to install for then still manages to install the wrong thing.

I don't like bloatware and since it only found 2 games on my system (with add not showing anything else) it seemed completely pointless. Plus I couldn't find any options in it to set which gpu to use, but maybe that's because I installed the wrong version.

I avoid updates on PC in general as long as things work. Plenty times in the past it either made things slower or messed things up. My windows 7 desktop is still trying to apply some old updates (and failing) while windows 7 support has long ended.

No clue why the windows store is broken (again), it worked with FH4 and other gamepass games last year. However earlier whatever I tried, I never managed to get it to download Project Spark. It's on the horrible side of windows which I pretend doesn't exist :) Windows key + X is the only thing I use.

I like PC flexibility, but I really don't like the myriads of problems it also present.

I honestly have no idea what the 'myriads of problems' are, and PC has been my main platform for ages. I don't think I've had any major trouble since the 2000s. In that time, I've had at least one console break just after its warranty expired, and there are several other inconveniences as well. Anyway, my point is that PC gaming these days seems to be relatively hassle-free despite the misconceptions of many people.

My myriad of problems involve a notebook that even when turned down turns itself on alone and keeps heating and consuming battery when I'm traveling so when I get where I need I have no battery. It doesn't get back after sleep, needing to be rebooted whenever it enter sleep mode. It also can't ever make camera and even audio firmware work right so I can't get it back even after several reinstals of windows 10 (it works for a little while but then it breaks again). The clock doesn't work right. If I leave it on manual it get stuck inside a 1h cycle (let's say it is 1pm so it will work for 1h, but when it would go to 2pm it returns to 1pm for perpetuity until I go and manual update it), and if I put it on auto it works for a little longer, but it doesn't really synchro.

And those aren't all the issues this notebook have, besides the ones I had in other PC systems.

PS4 so far I haven't had any SW or FW problem. The biggest issue I had was needing to replace the disc reader (well the ones in my 3 notebooks also broke with little use, battery also always dying out after about 3 years and even power charger breaks within two years).

Myriads of problems?

Recent frustrations involve home schooling mostly:
- Copying files from iPhone to my laptop fails so often it's a good thing phones and gaming laptops are so expensive or they would have been smashed with a hammer long ago. Half the time the directory doesn't show up or simply empty. When it finally shows, halfway through copying I always get device not connected or other random errors. It takes at least 2 usually more tries to get stuff from the iPhone on my laptop. It even managed to get win10 to display a blue screen of death (empty blue, unresponsive)
- Email (Outlook). Opening school work attachments always generates errors. Click on an attached docx attachment "440 Login Timeout", click download, same thing. Open in new tab usually works but also generates you don't have permission errors. Click on a PDF attachment "Something went wrong generating a preview". These do work when downloading first.
- Sending completed work back, night mare. It's usually too big so my wife can't send it from her phone (hence the copying to my laptop) and OneDrive only works from my laptop. Uploading it directly to BrightSpace on my kids laptop always fails (hence taking pictures with the iPhone and jumping through hoops)

Everything you do nowadays requires a new account for awful recaptcha bullshit. That GeForce Experience installed but would not work without creating an account. ReCaptcha failed over and over until it locked me out telling me my computer was possibly sending random input, F you. Finally I managed to get GeForce experience to let me in by linking my google account. (And then uninstalled it as it wasn't what I needed anyway)

The sceen off after x minutes doesn't work anymore at all. At first I had the problem narrowed down to unplugging any charging controllers so the screen (and later) laptop would go to sleep again. (Any attached controllers keep waking it up) However since some automatic update it now doesn't turn off anymore without anything attached. MS keeps sending me updates on the 'problem' thread which so far is only people complaining about the same problem which has been going on since the start of win 10. MS hates the environment!

Trying to get windows to install unimportant stuff on my D: (storage) drive instead of my limited SSD (system) drive is another nightmare. I had to resort to using symbolic links to trick windows to stop putting certain crap on my SSD.

Minecraft put me off using mods ever again. Too many versions to keep track off, different tools, conflicts etc. I was spending 5x as much time trying to get mods to load than my kids were playing with them.

I don't know what's going on with the photo viewer. From the desktop it still works, yet from Total Commander I now get error executing program.


Not to say console gaming is peachy. I couldn't update ark with 80GB free on the ps4 pro. (The game is 46GB I think). Finally when deleting enough to have over 100GB free it did the update. And after saving too many video clips it won't start games anymore until you delete them. (Says insufficient disk space to start application while there's plenty) But at least it crashes far less often and updates simply work after the download starts.

Hey, I'm not saying there aren't problems with PCs in general, because there absolutely are. Every time I plug a USB stick in my computer, it seems to be random whether my PC can read it or not. If not, I switch it to different ports until it starts working. Of course there are other problems as well from time to time. However, it's PC gaming that I haven't had any major trouble in a long time, but I don't think it's a fair comparison to mention general PC problems in a gaming discussion unless all you have your computer for is gaming. My impression is that PC gaming these days is fairly easy - for more people than just me.

A lot of these issues are stemming from folk using outdated OS's, outdated hw and pushing mobile hw to it's limits, while expecting far more of them. 

LIke I bought my gf a gaming Laptop last Xmas, but I did also tell her not to expect the same levels of performance as my rig, because the two were so different. Heating is absolutely one of her main issues, but that's gaming lappy's and lappys in general for you. 

I myself have hardly had a PC related issue for years now, even gaming related. Only time I had a bad driver issue, was when Nvidia screwed the pooch with the game ready driver for Wolfenstein TNC, and even then they released a hotfix a few days later and resolved the issue for me. 

Starting to feel like this thread is becoming less about O{'s issues now though, and more about "what I dislike about PC gaming" instead. Not exactly on topic and more like a mini echo chamber. We had these way back in 2014, and they never ended well.

Oh no doubt. I mostly abandoned PC gaming in the naughties because it used to be far worse. Compared to that my recent 'troubles' are nothing.

Still there's lots of room for improvement in PC gaming. Controller support for one thing.
Forza Horizon 4 will not work even when simply having a DS4 plugged in to charge. Got to disconnect any peripherals and charging controllers to use a XBox controller to play. (It will not work with DS4, I have tried many workarounds)
Alt-tab, why can't MS ever get this right. Why does it work for some, not for others and some end up crashing hard. PC is supposed to be a multi tasking machine until you ask it to multi task... The PS4 never has this problem. Even when the shitty browser crashes yet again, you can always resume the game.

But true, games work better than ever out of the 'box' They might not run that well but the days of not starting at all or getting frequent blue screens of death are pretty much gone, as well as the nightmare of keeping different components of DirectX and OpenGL up to date and compatible with most games.

Someone who play frequently also has far less downtime for updates in percentage than someone who plays once a week. I stopped checking in on Elite Dangerous since every time I wanted play for a little bit, an update was waiting again, with possible new driver updates needed and new balancing of graphics settings. Once it lost all my controller bindings as well after an update, 6 pages of settings ugh.

It's better than it used to be at least.