How does one manually restart graphics drivers?

Question

I'm suffering from the dreaded Radeon mouse cursor corruption. The problem is intermittent and can be "solved" by putting the computer to sleep or restarting it. I hope simply restarting the graphics drivers will remove the symptoms of the problem. This question would seem to indicate that restarting the graphics drivers is possible in Windows 7. My question is: how?

Answer 1

To reset the graphics stack in Windows, press Win+Ctrl+Shift+B.

Answer 2

If anybody is still searching for simple answer, then in Windows 7 it's as follows:

1. Open Device Manager
2. Expand Display adapters
3. Right click on a graphic card and choose Disable
4. Wait till the screen goes back and repeat step 3 with Enable.

That's it.

Answer 3

I had a similar problem on windows 8 and found that just changing the screen resolution and changing it back again resolved the corruption.

Answer 4

You could also use ToastyX's awesome restart utilty.

Inside the CRU zip file downloaded from the link above, you'll find two utilities named restart.exe and restart64.exe that can be used to restart the graphics drivers. Use restart64.exe if you're on a 64-bit version of Windows and the regular restart.exe otherwise.

Answer 5

You could also try:

1. Go to Device Manager > Display Adapters
2. Select "Scan for hardware changes"

If I leave my Win 7 machine on overnight at work, the resolution drops on one of the monitors. Altering the resolution doesn't work directly, but using the "Scan for hardware changes" seems to do the trick.