[SOLVED] How do I factory reset the motherboard so that it installs the default drivers?

Yoiji

Honorable
Mar 29, 2018
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10,585
Ever since I updated some drivers on the Asus website, the performance has gotten worse. I factory reset my PC 2 times this past week and it keeps installing the drivers I updated instead of the factory default ones. So how can I make this motherboard reset to have its factory default drivers?

I don't understand. On my old Asus Rog Strix motherboard, if I uninstalled a driver, it had built in drivers. So if I restarted the PC it would redownloaded factory default drivers. With this Asus Rog Strix z490e, it doesn't seem to keep the factory default drivers so if I delete a driver it won't redownload after a restart. Is this normal or is this motherboard broken?
 
Solution
Ever since I updated some drivers on the Asus website...

Just type 'Reset this PC' in the Cortana search box and it will open a dialogue to get you started.

Short of doing a 'reset' I'd un-install any of the motherboard utilities first and see if that helps. When doing the 'Reset your PC' you can choose to save your personal files but it will un-install ALL apps so you'll have to re-install them. It should install default drivers for everything it can; that usually includes audio and LAN but not always WiFi so be on a LAN cable.

The best way to get a fresh start is doing a clean install though.

After either a RESET or clean install, keep hitting Windows Update until it's completely updated before you do anything else...

Colif

Win 11 Master
Moderator
It isn't the motherboard that controls the drivers, it is Windows. Motherboards don't have any drivers on them.
Factory resets only take you back a few months on Windows 10, not to the dawn of time. I don't know what drivers the old motherboard had, but it is fairly normal for Windows to reinstall software for hardware on restart.
You could try a clean install to try and get the drivers back or we could try to fix it now so that you don't need to roll back.
 
Ever since I updated some drivers on the Asus website...

Just type 'Reset this PC' in the Cortana search box and it will open a dialogue to get you started.

Short of doing a 'reset' I'd un-install any of the motherboard utilities first and see if that helps. When doing the 'Reset your PC' you can choose to save your personal files but it will un-install ALL apps so you'll have to re-install them. It should install default drivers for everything it can; that usually includes audio and LAN but not always WiFi so be on a LAN cable.

The best way to get a fresh start is doing a clean install though.

After either a RESET or clean install, keep hitting Windows Update until it's completely updated before you do anything else.

Afterwords, be choosey about the drivers you get from the motherboard mfr. Install none of their utilities, for instance, and only certain other drivers like LAN, audio and WiFi. Get GPU drivers from AMD or Nvidia. I'm not sure where best is for chipset/PCH/CPU drivers with Intel; Microsoft might keep them updated for you but for an AMD system get chipset/cpu drivers from AMD only.
 
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Solution

Colif

Win 11 Master
Moderator
Does the motherboard Disc come with the default drivers then? I think I am going to try and run the disc onto a USB and then plug the USB in
it will have older copies of the drivers, yes. You can probably copy them onto USB and install from there. But you will need to reinstall windows from the Installer to be able to install those drivers. Otherwise windows will know it has newer drivers. A reset might work