How does one manually restart graphics drivers?

Question

I'm suffering from the dreaded Radeon mouse cursor corruption. The problem is intermittent and can be "solved" by putting the computer to sleep or restarting it. I hope simply restarting the graphics drivers will remove the symptoms of the problem. This question would seem to indicate that restarting the graphics drivers is possible in Windows 7. My question is: how?

Disable and re-enable the graphics adapter in the computer management screen? Not at my Win7 machine to check at the moment... — DMA57361, Aug 21 '10 at 12:33
That seems to revert back to the Microsoft stock driver, but I don't know enough about how display drivers work to know if upon re-enabling the device the driver has been restarted from scratch or if it retains some of its state. It didn't solve my problem unfortunately. — sequentiallee, Aug 21 '10 at 12:42
To be more specific, the problem goes away while using the Microsoft driver, but returns upon re-enabling the AMD drivers. — sequentiallee, Aug 22 '10 at 16:44

score 59 · Answer 1 · answered Nov 21 '16 at 10:08

59

To reset the graphics stack in Windows, press Win+Ctrl+Shift+B.

answered Nov 21 '16 at 10:08

Matija Grcic

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Hmm. That opens the FF bookmark windows here ... – DavidPostill Nov 21 '16 at 12:57
@DavidPostill It does work but you have to be on the desktop. – Burgi Nov 21 '16 at 15:50
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Nothing happens, with desktop focus. Windows 7 x64. – Brad Dec 26 '16 at 16:56
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works in win10: http://superuser.com/questions/1127463/what-does-ctrlwinshiftb-do-in-windows – Mike Trusov Jan 26 '17 at 21:24
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+100 this works! It is really hard to use the most upvoted answer above if all you see is a black screen. – gyozo kudor Mar 01 '17 at 17:55
Is there a commandline to do this? – bgmCoder May 04 '18 at 18:55
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This fails with a beep if the graphics card has had issues and Windows has disabled it for you – Matthew Lock Nov 18 '18 at 06:47
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The question was about Windows 7, not Windows 10. – Magnus Lyckå Sep 16 '19 at 09:11
This. Confirming this shortcut works in latest Win 10 v1909 build. – AlexVPerl Mar 19 '20 at 00:56

score 49 · Answer 2 · answered Jan 11 '13 at 17:22

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If anybody is still searching for simple answer, then in Windows 7 it's as follows:

Open Device Manager
Expand Display adapters
Right click on a graphic card and choose Disable
Wait till the screen goes back and repeat step 3 with Enable.

That's it.

answered Jan 11 '13 at 17:22

MrDOOM

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Mind that the screen might not go back on. – clorz Apr 07 '14 at 16:34
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Following on from clorz's point, I'd recommend turning the Narrator feature on prior to performing these steps. Then even if the screen doesn't come back immediately, you can use Narrator's prompts and the keyboard to re-enable the driver. – samthecodingman Aug 13 '20 at 13:34
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I'm not sure why the screen would *ever* go back on when you've just disabled the thing sending data to the screen. I tested this on Windows 7 x64 SP1 and, as expected, it did not. I thought I might be able to re-enable the driver using the keyboard (context menu key, down, down, Enter), but no, that didn't work. I had to power off and restart in Safe Mode to re-enable the drive. -1 from me. – EM0 Aug 19 '20 at 08:05
@EM0 It should revert to the basic display driver, not turn off completely. At least if your Windows logo and BIOS prompts show up on that display. – Paul Stelian Mar 09 '21 at 19:38

score 11 · Answer 3 · edited Feb 05 '13 at 01:30

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I had a similar problem on windows 8 and found that just changing the screen resolution and changing it back again resolved the corruption.

edited Feb 05 '13 at 01:30

Paul

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answered Feb 04 '13 at 21:59

Peter

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score 6 · Accepted Answer · edited Sep 20 '17 at 23:35

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You could also use ToastyX's awesome restart utilty.

Inside the CRU zip file downloaded from the link above, you'll find two utilities named restart.exe and restart64.exe that can be used to restart the graphics drivers. Use restart64.exe if you're on a 64-bit version of Windows and the regular restart.exe otherwise.

edited Sep 20 '17 at 23:35

Mahmoud Al-Qudsi

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answered Aug 07 '17 at 16:16

mirh

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AMD driver just died after using it, the screen went black and didn't return. Had to restart PC. – GrayFace Dec 22 '19 at 00:20
Proper WDDM drivers shouldn't crash the system even if you were to uninstall them without rebooting. If that happens, it's a bug on amd part. – mirh Dec 22 '19 at 23:14

score 3 · Answer 5 · answered Jan 07 '15 at 09:02

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You could also try:

Go to Device Manager > Display Adapters
Select "Scan for hardware changes"

If I leave my Win 7 machine on overnight at work, the resolution drops on one of the monitors. Altering the resolution doesn't work directly, but using the "Scan for hardware changes" seems to do the trick.

answered Jan 07 '15 at 09:02

Matt

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Worked for me on Win10 – Sasha Sep 07 '16 at 07:13

How does one manually restart graphics drivers?

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