I guess it just happens every so often. Right now, Lenovo Vantage is nagging me to upgrade graphics drivers — both Intel and NVIDIA — on my 2018 Vintage Thinkpad X1 Extreme. (Internals: i7-8850H CPU, 32 GB DDR4, NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1050 Ti, dual Samsung OEM SSDs.) But Lenovo Vantage wants me to run an Optimus display driver and GeForce Experience wants a GeForce Game Ready Driver. The back-n-forth is leading to some X1 Extreme graphics driver delirium. What’s a body to do?

Surmounting X1 Extreme Graphics Driver Delirium

In a nutshell the problem is this: when I update to the Optimus driver, GeForce tells me to update to the Game Ready Driver, When I go the other way round, that flips so Lenovo Vantage tells me to get back on its track. I don’t do a lot of heavy-duty graphics on this laptop, and I’ll be darned if I can tell any difference.

I asked Copilot: “What’s the difference between running a GeForce Game Ready Driver versus NVIDIA Optimus Display Driver on a GeForce GTX 1050 Ti with Max-Q Design?” It says: battery and easy switching between discrete and integrated GPU for Optimus, versus gaming performance and support for newest games for Game Ready Driver.

Dilemma dehorned: I don’t play games and I do switch back and forth between the Intel UHD 630 and the discrete GPU. But I had to finagle a bit to get the status from Lenovo Vantage you see above, where it tells me “No updates available.” Deets follow next…

Both Intel and Optimus Must Update

Something about the update package from Lenovo was successfully updating the GeForce driver, but failing to do the same for Intel. How could I tell? Two ways:

1. The Update package did not run all the way to completion.
2. The driver version for the Nvidia device matched that for the Lenovo update package (31.0.15.3770), while that for the Intel UHD 620 was lower (update version was 27.20.100.9316 but the running version ended in 8967 instead). Oops!

Because the Lenovo installer wasn’t finishing up (and the Intel Driver & Support Assistant was cheerfully oblivious), I exercised the download package’s offer to extract its contents to a folder. Then I went into Device Manager, right-clicked into “Update driver” and turned it loose on the Intel folder in the unzipped file archive that extract created for me. It took a while to complete, but this worked.

So now, I’ve got the latest Optimus drivers for my X1 Extreme and it’s all good. Here in Windows World, if you’re willing to stop and think about what you’re doing, there’s nearly always a way to fix such issues. Done!

Yesterday’s post about generic, MS-supplied device drivers got me thinking. These drivers bear an issue date of 6/21/2006, which coincides with Windows Vista’s RTM date. To be more specific, I wondered how many such items might appear in the Windows DriverStore. With counting MS 2006 drivers in mind, I asked Copilot for a PowerShell script to count them for me. Just for grins I compared that count to the total items as well.

Scripting Out Counting MS 2006 Drivers

You can see the results of my query to Copilot in the lead-in graphic. That query was “Write me a PowerShell script to display number of Windows drivers dated 6/21/2006 and total driver count.” As it turned out, on my Lenovo X380 ThinkPad running Windows 11, those numbers were 517 (2006 count) and 701 (total count). On my i7Skylake homebuilt system running Windows 10, those numbers were 511 and 672, respectively.

I’ll show the PowerShell commands below, but first I want to observe I had NO IDEA that MS supplies roughly 5 of every 7 drivers that Windows uses (over 70%). From looking at the items in the DriverStore more closely thanks to PowerShell, I see that this is because many of them are class, bus and service drivers. You can thus understand them as part of the driver stack between the OS and the function driver (at the bottom of the stack, it actually interacts with devices).

Here’s how MS shows this architecture in its MS Learn article “What is a driver?”

The driver at the bottom of the stack that communicates with a device is a function driver; according to the MS Learn item, filter drivers do “auxiliary processing” which may involve monitoring, verifying, translating, or otherwise manipulating in- and out-bound stack communications. By convention app to device communication moves down the stack, while device to app communication goes the other way.

PowerShell Details

Here’s the PowerShell that Copilot handed to me in response to my query, including comments (start with a # character):

#Get all the drivers from the online Windows image
$drivers = Get-WindowsDriver -Online -All
# Filter the drivers by the date of June 21, 2006
$drivers_2006 = $drivers | Where-Object {$_.Date -eq "6/21/2006"}
# Count the number of drivers with that date
$drivers_2006_count = $drivers_2006.Count
# Display the number of drivers and their names
Write-Output "There are $drivers_2006_count drivers dated 6/21/2006 in the online Windows image."
Write-Output "The names of the drivers are:"
$drivers_2006 | ForEach-Object {Write-Output $_.OriginalFileName}
# Display the total number of drivers
$alld = $drivers | Where-Object {$_.Inbox -eq "True"}
Write-Output "There are $alld.count total Windows drivers in the online Windows image."


Some of the lines shown above break across two lines in the browser, but are actually single PowerShell commands. If you run them, you must put them on a single line. I just ran the commands in sequence, one at a time as you can see in the lead-in graphic. I cheated, though: I simply output $alld.count in the last line shown. The PowerShell shown above wraps this in some explanatory text.