The Road to a Computer on the Verge of Collapse After a Windows Update

My notebook is ASUS's Fei 8, purchased around July 2021. At that time I had just graduated high school, thinking that spending a hefty amount of money (which is already a lot for a student) would be enough to buy a nicer laptop to enjoy college, so I bought it after two months of summer work.

Before purchasing, I was busy too, working from 7am to 9pm every day at a summer job, so I only did a quick bit of reading and bought it without much consideration. But about half a month after it arrived I started Baidu-ing and found online reviews of Fei 8 were a bit harsh. The main sentiment, though, was one thing: 'Crashing Fortress'.

Crashing Fortress

As a gaming laptop, the Crashing Fortress earned its nickname because of cooling issues; the fortress hardware CPU and GPU were upgraded, but the cooling and the chassis remained the same, and the sound when gaming was like a tsunami, so it was mocked as 'Crashing Fortress'.

However, the Crashing Fortress in my hands doesn't crash; there are basically no heat issues, but the computer updates were very problematic.

Mysterious Updates

Around May, the laptop's wireless NIC suddenly started having problems, intermittent and very annoying. My NIC is Intel(R) AX201, and after some browsing I found that the fortress's NIC driver is a common issue. Baidu Tieba and CSDN alike were all complaining about NIC problems.

After tinkering for a while I found that the NIC issue stemmed from a Windows sneaky update the day before.

After the automatic update, the network adapter's power management property would be automatically checked, causing the fan speed to ramp up (for example when opening a game) and the NIC to stop working.

After knowing the problem, I restored the computer to the original state when I first bought it, and also rolled back the BIOS by several versions, finally resolving the issue.

Updates Like a Dog-Skin Plaster

After the system initialization, I Baidu-ed methods to disable updates. I disabled Windows Update, disabled the registry as well, closed services, disabled Group Policy, fearing that it would come back from the dead.

Guess what happened?

The invincible one came back again, starting to download automatically and to update automatically.

If you don’t update, it stays in the bottom-right corner, always reminding you. For someone like me with OCD, I couldn't stand it and moved it to the small menu.

When shutting down, it also becomes five options, and it doesn’t forget to remind you to upgrade; hurry up and upgrade quickly.

They say wild grass has strong vitality; I think system updates have strong vitality too, and even when disabled they can revive.