Ok the last hour of my life is gone and I will never get it back....ugh
That was a nightmare.
Turns out I must have had something wrong in the hardware id section of the policy I set up to block updating the GPU driver, because the (windoze) update seemed to go fine, even though I did it via team viewer.
When it was complete, I was presented with a restart prompt, but then (upon restart) the computer was dead in the water, No remote access, no BI, nothing, so I pulled it out of it's spot, and plugged in a monitor and the GPU, NiC and myriad other things were simply missing from device manager. Nothing. My system restore point was missing as well, which I created immediately after getting everything set up and running yesterday.
Anyway, my first instinct was to try and install the gpu driver, but since the gpu was not being recognized by the system, I immediately went to the policy settings and deleted the hardware ID's I had inserted and then disabled the service completely. As soon as I did that, the screen flashed and everything came back to life, however, a newer driver had been installed for the gpu. Fortunately, the rollback function showed the 4664 driver I installed yesterday, and it reinstalled that seamlessly.
Nonetheless, the GPU feature is still missing from task manager, so not really sure what is going on there since your driver is older than mine, so there really should not be any reason that feature is missing in mine.
Alas, the system is back up and running smoothly now, so it may just be that either live with the driver updating itself when windows updates, or I simply revert back to no hardware acceleration. Option 2 seems completely viable since the system does not seem to be hampered without it, but we shall see...
In the meantime, I am going to look for some more information on properly blocking the driver update without screwing the system when it reboots...... I definitely missed something there....
