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Drivers
"Update all drivers to the newest available" is not a tuning strategy. On HP business platforms the vendor-packaged driver is frequently paired with platform-specific configuration that the generic newer driver does not carry.
The driver inventory writeup covers recording what is installed, where it came from, and its revision, which is the prerequisite for being able to reason about a regression at all. Driver inventory writeup.
Been caught by this with a storage controller driver. The generic newer version installed cleanly, worked, and quietly changed the write caching behaviour. Nothing failed, the machine was just different, and it took a while to notice why.
One machine, no controlled comparison, so this is an observation. But it is the reason I now record driver provenance.
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