My PC started freezing up a few times a day. Not finding any smoking gun in Event Viewer, I looked for recent updates to rollback, and I found https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/support/articles/000095780/memory-and-storage.html good reason to suspect that Intel Optane Pinning Shell Extensions may be the culprit, as it was one of several Dell & Intel driver & component updates that had run a day before the freeze-ups started. (In case it matters, the update was to version 18.7.1.1003)
I uninstalled it from Device Manager > Software Components, restarted the computer, also checking the box to uninstall the associated driver. After a while the computer froze again. I checked Device Manager and found that Pinning Extensions was back! Now at a previous version, 18.1.2.1034.
I tried uninstalling both of the Optane items, that and Intel Optane Memory and Storage Management Components, waited a while without restarting, and found that both of them reinstall themselves in Device Manager after several minutes.
There never were Optane anything in Control Panel's list of installed apps, but in Windows Settings > Apps, I did find Intel Optane Memory and Storage Management. I uninstalled that, then retried uninstalling the Optane components from Device Manager. Optane doesn't reappear in Settings > Apps, but again after a few minutes Pinning Extensions reappears in Device Manager.
So: Does anyone know what's automatically re-installing this Intel Optane thing? And how to uninstall it permanently? I'm pretty certain that I don't need it.
My PC details:
- Dell XPS 8940
- Windows 11 Home 23H2, 22631.3296
- 11th Gen Intel Core i7-11700 @ 2.50 GHz
- 40.0 GB RAM
