I’ve been having an issue with an old version of Adobe Photoshop not working after a Windows 11 update, which seems to have resolved itself after I updated the graphics driver, but then broke again today after yet another Windows 11 cumulative update (I checked my Photoshop before and after installing the update since I was worried about the problem re-occurring).
And then I found that I could not successfully connect my Google Pixel 8 phone to transfer files to my Framework laptop via a physical USB cable, when I never had trouble with this before (it had been a few months since I last tried it). The laptop would briefly recognize the Pixel phone, and then it would say
“USB device not recognized
The last USB device you connected to this computer malfunctioned, and Windows does not recognize it.”
Rolling back the Windows update did not fix these issues.
After many frustrating hours of trying various things, uninstalling and reinstalling software, contacting Google support, what finally fixed BOTH issues was uninstalling the Intel Iris XE Graphics Driver, restarting the laptop, repeating this step, then letting Device Manager reinstall the Intel Iris XE Graphics driver through Scan for Hardware Changes now.
I had installed the Intel Iris XE Graphics driver originally from the Framework Driver bundle for my laptop, and I again today when I had trouble I reinstalled the drivers from the Framework bundle from last June. Windows subsequently found an updated Iris XE driver when I tried to update it through the Device Manager, but even after a restart it did not fix the issues.
Then I completely uninstalled the Intel Iris XE Graphics driver, and had Device Manager scan for hardware changes again. This time Device Manager installed the updated Iris XE driver directly and found no further driver updates.
This suggests to me that there may be an issue somewhere with updating the older Iris XE driver included in the Framework bundle, that somehow Windows isn’t updating the driver correctly. I’m also not too happy with the display in my older version of Adobe Photoshop with this driver, it looks a bit fuzzy when other programs don’t. Somehow how Photoshop interacts with graphics drivers is different than say Adobe Illustrator, it seems that numerous people have encountered compatibility issues with various versions of Photoshop and their graphics drivers.
I don’t know if the problem lies with Microsoft Windows or with Intel, but in any case Framework may wish to consider updating the integrated graphics driver included in their driver bundle if Windows updates are going to break it.