Switched from Intel to AMD CPU but Intel driver updates still happen

I swapped out my Intel i9 based Win11 Pro system for an AMD Ryzen one by simply restoring a Macrium system backup (the whole C: drive) onto the new Ryzen machine. I was pleasantly surprised that the whole process worked quite well and required only minimal tweaks. The new machine has been running just fine for several weeks now.

Except (isn't there always an except?) that Windows Update continues to install updates for Intel drivers. I don't think I need any of those drivers, but I guess the registry (or something) is telling Update that I still have them. Here's a sample from RAPR that shows some of them:



Also, Autoruns shows these drives as still being active and loaded:



Is there a way to tell if a particular Intel driver is still needed, or if it's just a leftover from my old Intel based system?

Birk said:

I swapped out my Intel i9 based Win11 Pro system for an AMD Ryzen one by simply restoring a Macrium system backup (the whole C: drive) onto the new Ryzen machine. I was pleasantly surprised that the whole process worked quite well and required only minimal tweaks. The new machine has been running just fine for several weeks now.

Except (isn't there always an except?) that Windows Update continues to install updates for Intel drivers. I don't think I need any of those drivers, but I guess the registry (or something) is telling Update that I still have them. Here's a sample from RAPR that shows some of them:

View attachment 162337

Also, Autoruns shows these drives as still being active and loaded:

View attachment 162338

Is there a way to tell if a particular Intel driver is still needed, or if it's just a leftover from my old Intel based system?

Click to expand...

Since you use DriverStoreExplorer (RAPR), you can do this...

Open RAPR and EXPORT all drivers to a folder. When done, go to the location where you saved the drivers. You will note that there is a folder called "Drivers without an existing device". In theory, you should be able to select those drivers and delete them.

IMPORTANT: I would suggest an image backup first, or at the very least, keep these exported drivers until you know that all is well so that you can restore any of them if necessary. Note that I have put in a feature request for RAPR asking for the ability to select these drivers independently. I don't know if that will eventually be implemented, but for now it is a manual process.

Of course, there is the far more distasteful method that will 100% guaranteed resolve this: Reinstall Windows from scratch installing only the proper drivers.

NOTE: Having these additional drivers won't hurt anything. In fact, I used to use an ISO image that had the drivers for about 10 different systems all pre-integrated, just for testing purposes. But that meant that every time I installed Windows it would load up ALL of those drivers to the drive (although they would not be active).

EDIT: For the trick above to work, in RAPR, make sure that Options / Use Native Driver Store is selected. If you have Use DISM selected instead, you will not see folder names that include the "Drivers without an existing device" folder.

Various chip drivers for "stuff" on the mobo. My MSI AMD Ryzen mobo has many of those entries in my autoruns.

Intel also makes some hardware other than CPU and Chip sets, like WiFi and Bluetooth devices.

@Birk

You can also disable drivers included with Windows Updates...

hsehestedt said:

Open RAPR and EXPORT all drivers to a folder. When done, go to the location where you saved the drivers. You will note that there is a folder called "Drivers without an existing device". In theory, you should be able to select those drivers and delete them.

Click to expand...

Wow - that really works well. I had no idea what that function did, but it sure does tell the story:

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Many of those directories have multiple drivers in them. The Display Adapter has drivers for both AMD Radeon graphics (which I now have) and Intel UHD graphics (which is non-existent.) So I've got some work to do before I have a good list of things to delete. ANd of course I'll make a full image backup of my C: drive before I do anything.

Thanks for the tip - it is a doozie.

Birk said:

Thanks for the tip - it is a doozie.

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Thanks! BTW, do make sure to let us know how it goes. I have not had to remove drivers like that. The most I have done is removed an old display driver as well as WiFi and Bluetooth drivers whenever they get updated, so I'd be curious how it goes for you.

I typically do clean installs rather than migrating the existing installation simply because I have made so many automated processes for myself that it's almost as easy starting over rather than migrating so I'm curious to know how it all works out for you.

Birk said:

I swapped out my Intel i9 based Win11 Pro system for an AMD Ryzen one by simply restoring a Macrium system backup (the whole C: drive) onto the new Ryzen machine. I was pleasantly surprised that the whole process worked quite well and required only minimal tweaks. The new machine has been running just fine for several weeks now.

Except (isn't there always an except?) that Windows Update continues to install updates for Intel drivers. I don't think I need any of those drivers, but I guess the registry (or something) is telling Update that I still have them. Here's a sample from RAPR that shows some of them:

Click to expand...

So how did yopu pull this off? I did similar to what you did a LONG time ago with Win-XP but not since then. What I did was I went into control panel and deleted all the drivers and then shut it down, swapped the Motherboard and turned it on and let it discover all the new devices. I was wondering if that would still work with Windows 7 or 11. Maybe I booted into safe mode first, I can't remember.

john1955 said:

So how did yopu pull this off?

Click to expand...

I know that you were not asking me, but I'll just chime in and note how I did this when I was experimenting with it a month or two ago...

I simply went to the original machine (the source) and imaged the drive using DISM while booted from Windows installation media. I deployed that image to a new machine (same sort of deal - went from Intel based system to AMD). Windows worked perfectly. I did have some additional drivers to install, but that is all automated for me. Worked without a hitch.

NOTE: While I used DISM, this is not necessary. Programs like Macrium Reflect are specifically designed to restore to dissimilar hardware with no problems.

I still prefer to do clean installs, but I just wanted to test and make sure I knew how to do this if I really had to. That was prompted by a recent hardware failure where I had no choice but to migrate to new hardware

hsehestedt said:

I know that you were not asking me, but I'll just chime in and note how I did this when I was experimenting with it a month or two ago...

I simply went to the original machine (the source) and imaged the drive using DISM while booted from Windows installation media. I deployed that image to a new machine (same sort of deal - went from Intel based system to AMD). Windows worked perfectly. I did have some additional drivers to install, but that is all automated for me. Worked without a hitch.

NOTE: While I used DISM, this is not necessary. Programs like Macrium Reflect are specifically designed to restore to dissimilar hardware with no problems.

I still prefer to do clean installs, but I just wanted to test and make sure I knew how to do this if I really had to. That was prompted by a recent hardware failure where I had no choice but to migrate to new hardware

Click to expand...

No problem, Thanks for chiming in, I didn't know Macrium had that option, I just started using it recently

Yes, I will certainly post my results here, hopefully in just a few days from now. It's going to take a while to go through the complete list of drivers, and my guess is I'll delete one or two that will have to be restored etc.

As far as how I made the original transition goes - I just did a standard backup/restore. I did notice that during the restore there was an extra restart that said something about "Loading drivers". I assumed that was Macrium pulling in the required AMD drivers, which is something I had not seen it do before. However, all my previous restores were from backups of the same system.

Good news: it seems to have worked.

I ran down the RAPR list of "Drivers without existing device" and deleted all the ones that showed as Intel ones. Apparently a single driver name can include other drivers that have a related name because quite a few of the listed drivers were not in RAPR's list of current drivers. (That sounds confusing - because it is. That's not my fault.)

A fair number of drivers in the "Drivers without existing device" belonged to either Kensington or Logitech. Since I have a Kensington trackball and a Logitech keyboard I left those alone. Also, I left all the AMD ones as well.

Fortunately my system rebooted just fine after the driver deletion, and both my keyboard and trackball work. So I'm going to mark this thread as solved. Thanks again to everyone who contributed.

Birk said:

Good news: it seems to have worked.

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Nice! Thanks for the update.

I recently changed my Win11 Pro PC from Intel based to AMD based. Using RAPR I removed all the Intel drivers from my system. Doing this did not cause any problems.

That was yesterday. Today I get this:



The first one says it will replace my current AMD video driver with an Intel one. This strikes me as risky at best and potentially illegal at worst. Furthermore, since my system is running fine with no Intel drives installed, why should I bother installing a bunch of them? My sense is that duplicate drivers jus cause problems I don't have and don't want.

Is there a way to stop Windows Update from telling me to install all this Intel stuff? I've read that there's a way to stop Update from installing all drivers, but this seems like overkill to me.