I had a rather disappointing experience recently with an Acer laptop that I’d like to make a note of. I think the crux of the issue is a difference between the latest driver available and the best driver for a machine.

The details are that the laptop is an Acer Aspire V5-122P. It is a cheap and cheerful laptop that I purchased for the following reasons:

• Backup machine in case my daily driver broke down,
• Low powered machine to test performance of websites,
• Laptop I could take travelling without undue stress as to it’s wellbeing.

In truth it was barely adequate for these purposes. Anything beyond sending a few emails and doing some basic web browsing was beyond its meagre 1Ghz dual core. That was even before the CPU was being 100% consumed with a mysterious system processes. After some searching I managed to track this down process to an issue with the latest version of the AMD graphics driver (21.19.149.0 at time of writing). This came with the driver pack version 16.40.3801_W10x64_A.

The correct version of the graphics driver loaded

I had upgraded the base system to Windows 10 from the original 8.1. Windows 10 has a feature whereby it will automatically update drivers based on, I assume, a database maintained by them. This upgrade of drivers was what was causing the spike in CPU usage. Another part of the solution was to stop Windows 10 doing automatic updates of some drivers. More information can be found here: HowTo Article

I’ve recorded this here as much for myself in the future. I think it’s important to state though that this basically renders this laptop unusable. Economy laptop or no, I think there should always be an expectation from the consumer that the device should basically work. I know that in practice nobody is wrong or bad here. AMD is trying to keep their drivers up to date. Maybe the issue with this version isn’t directly their fault even. Microsoft are trying to make the process of keeping up to date as transparent and easy as possible for the user. Acer shipped a working machine. Still though I can imagine a lot of consumers being completely baffled by this issue and having to give up. Coming from the macOS/Linux world for the last few years I have found this element of the situation very frustrating.