Summary Long-term eco power mode can power-gate the dGPU and make Windows auto-delete its drivers.
Such is the case for someone who discovered that if they ran their laptop on the eco power plan for 15 days, Windows would automatically delete the GPU drivers without telling them.
They own a ROG Zephyrus G14 with an RTX 5070 Ti, and they like running it in eco mode for long periods.
However, it turns out that using only eco mode for a few weeks causes something strange to happen with your laptop's built-in GPU:Eco mode power-gates the dGPU off the PCIe bus.
The logs show that Windows identified the GPU driver's inactivity for 15 days and automatically cleaned it up.
Summary Long-term eco power mode can power-gate the dGPU and make Windows auto-delete its drivers.
Check setupapi logs or run pnputil to see if Windows removed your GPU driver package.
Fix: occasionally use a non-eco power plan or disable driver cleanup via registry.
Windows is designed to be helpful, but sometimes it can be a little too helpful. Such is the case for someone who discovered that if they ran their laptop on the eco power plan for 15 days, Windows would automatically delete the GPU drivers without telling them. And while it sounds like an annoying quirk, fixing it is surprisingly easy.
Windows 11 will remove your laptop GPU's drivers if you stay on eco power mode for too long
Fortunately, there is a fix
As spotted by WccfTech, user Ok-Horse-3169 took to the Zephyrus G14 subreddit to share their findings. They own a ROG Zephyrus G14 with an RTX 5070 Ti, and they like running it in eco mode for long periods.
However, it turns out that using only eco mode for a few weeks causes something strange to happen with your laptop's built-in GPU:
Eco mode power-gates the dGPU off the PCIe bus. Windows treats it like a USB stick you unplugged: not present. There's a Windows maintenance job called pnpclean.dll that removes devices absent past a timeout, then removes any driver package nothing references any more. Default timeout is 30 days. Mine had a per-device value of 15.
What this means is that because eco mode cuts power to the GPU, the laptop mistakenly assumes the GPU has been unplugged for 15 days and tidies up the GPU's drivers during a routine scan. Of course, the GPU was never actually removed, but Windows hadn't 'seen' it for over two weeks, so it assumes it's gone.
In the original post, Ok-Horse-3169 posted Windows' cleanup logs as proof. The logs show that Windows identified the GPU driver's inactivity for 15 days and automatically cleaned it up. Afterward, when Ok-Horse-3169 switches back to the standard power mode and checks for its GPU in Windows, it's labeled as a "Basic Display Adapter," and the Nvidia Control Panel fails to recognize it.
Fortunately, the original poster also lists ways to check whether this happened on your laptop. This command will identify if your GPU was removed:
Select-String -Path C:\Windows\INF\setupapi.dev*.log -Pattern "(VEN_10DE|VEN_1002).*(was removed|timeout period)"
This one looks for logs concerning your driver package being deleted:
Select-String -Path C:\Windows\INF\setupapi.dev*.log -Pattern "unused drivers|INF oem\d+\.inf .*removed"
And if you run this command and see nothing returned, the package is missing:
pnputil /enum-drivers | Select-String "nvamsi"
To fix this, Ok-Horse-3169 recommends either running your laptop on something other than eco mode every so often to 'wake up' the GPU, or tweaking the registry like this:
HKLM\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer\VolumeCaches\Device Driver Packages
Autorun (DWORD) = 0
Either way, it's a good thing to remember if you use your laptop in eco mode a lot. Give it a power boost every so often to remind Windows that the laptop still has hardware you'd rather it keep drivers for.
