Surface Book 3 Nvidia Graphics card disappears after updates.

Anonymous
2020-06-20T23:18:58+00:00

I bought the Surface book 3 a few weeks ago. It just installed some updates and now my Nvidia card has disappeared from the device manger. 

It was working properly before the updates go installed so now I am suspecting it's something to do with the windows updates. My surface book hasn't received the latest 2004 windows update yet. I have already gone through the Nvidia driver experience app to manual install the graphics card driver but it says it can't detect any graphics card. I am pretty sure a brand new 3grand machine will not be equipped with a faulty graphics card, because that will be stupid. Will be contacting MS soon. Is anyone else experiencing the same problem.

Surface | Surface Book | Display and screen

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  1. Anonymous
    2020-11-03T19:17:04+00:00

    Unfortunately for me, I was really stupid. I had a SurfaceBook2 that had this issue. Yet, I liked the design so much and was convince the SB3 had fixed the problem that I bought a SurfaceBook3... that STILL has the issue. I have run the Diagnostics Toolkit on BOTH machines. I have updated drivers from Microsoft. I have loaded drivers from NVIDIA and the problem still persists to this day. I attempted to return the SB3 after weeks of swapping for return units that exhibited the same problem, multiple emails and multiple calls, on all three replacement machines, with Microsoft support only to have Microsoft tell me that I was now unable to return the unit.

    I think this is a perfect example of the Texas Lemon Law and ripe for a class action lawsuit. While I love the design of the unit this is simply abysmal that the company that WRITES the OS can't even figure out how to stop it from dropping the graphics card or stop it from causing a Blue Screen from the nvlddmkm.sys driver; which has happened on BOTH machines. UGH!

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  2. Anonymous
    2020-11-10T21:28:19+00:00

    Amazing.  Thank you Zim!  You saved me so much time trying to fix.

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  3. Anonymous
    2020-11-10T21:56:30+00:00

    If you watch the task manager you will note that the GPU actually disconnects multiple times a day. You will also see that it drops from the Device Manager. You can simply "Scan for hardware changes" under the Display adapters to have it show back up in the Device Manager and become available. However, it does beg the question, "Why does the GPU keep disappearing throughout the use of normal operations on this machine?" I suspect it has something to do with the Surface Detach process running in the background (in the tray bar notification area).

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  4. Anonymous
    2020-11-19T14:45:20+00:00

    I found the easiest fix!!

    1. Go to device manager
    2. Right click on display adaptors 
    3. Press scan for hardware changes

    It should be back and working now:))

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  5. Anonymous
    2020-11-19T14:55:58+00:00

    That's what I wrote in my previous reply. The question is really, "Why does the GPU keep getting dropped from the OS?" This should not be happening especially if you use the GPU to accelerate graphics operations in the OS. 

    It would be sort of like driving down the road and having to stop every so often to replace the lug nuts from the wheels on your car so they don't fall off. The problem is that before you get to the next stop one, or all, of the wheels have already fallen off and the car grinds to a halt.

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