Driver Update Fucked Everything on My Work Laptop (in Minor but Obnoxious Ways) :(

Ughhhh

While running down a minor issue (trying to figure out whether or not my specific laptop had been configured with the optional bluetooth adapter or not) on Dell’s website, I went ahead and let their system detector tool refresh a few ancient drivers for my system (an Inspiron E6540).

In the first few reboots, the graphics were just totally boned and wouldn’t support Windows Aero anymore, which I’d grown kinda accustomed to.

Last week’s reboot seemed to fix that, but now I get all sorts of other weird behavior. My laptop no longer recognizes its own lid closing, for instance. e.g., in power settings, I have it configured to Sleep on lid close, but it just ignores that. Lid opening does nothing while PC is in sleep (cuz if I manually trigger Sleep, it works fine), so I have to hit power. ALso, whatever Windows 7 setting lets a PC awaken immediately from Sleep must have gotten boned, cuz now I get a 30-second churn of black screen + Windows logo.

And now, today’s reboot has borked. . . external link thumbnails on Facebook? See below:

Internal FB links (e.g., to other FB pages or shares) work just fine and generate thumbnails as usual, but external links just produce flat white boxes. It’s up-to-date Chrome and that issue isn’t cropping up on other websites. I’ve tried disabling and reenabling hardware acceleration in Chrome to no effect.

What the fuck did Dell do to my PC :(

System restore?

Turned off by the university IT dept -.-

Hand it to them, it’s their problem.

Upshot:

Facebook thing is more widespread and not related to drivers.

Downside:

After 3 years of personalization and tweaking, I’m not thrilled about handing the work PC off to IT for their bog-standard fix: holding it for 2 weeks and then reimaging it. Esp. since whatever tweaks they’ve made to their standard Win10 image (they won’t reimage to 7 anymore) makes it slow as all fuck on all the laptops we’ve sent to them in the last few months.