How to remove the AMD PCI Express (3GIO) Filter Driver

tl;dr:

1. Go to device manager.
2. Find?AMD PCI Express (3GIO) Filter Driver.
3. Update the driver.
4. Browse my computer.
5. Point to the folder full of intel chipset drivers.
6. Voila.
7. Reboot.

My Mom’s HP laptop just died, the night before she is scheduled to fly up to Canada for an extended visit. She needs the laptop, it’s her livelihood. So I do what I think is the easiest approach and swap the drive into my laptop. Even knowing it’s Windows 7 and I’m going from AMD to Intel based chipsets it should work. And it did. Except for PoS?AMD PCI Express (3GIO) Filter Driver.

After swapping the drive I got all the drivers installed and showing good except my Intel HD Graphics 4000 driver. It had a big fat yellow ! and an error stating “This device cannot find enough free resources that it can use. (Code 12)”. I made sure all the AMD drivers were uninstalled, cleaned the registry of their existence, and even searched for their old brethren ATI. After some quick searching through the rest of the drivers in device manager I found the last remaining AMD driver,?AMD PCI Express (3GIO) Filter Driver. Right clicked, uninstall and check the box to uninstall the driver software. Turns out that is the PCI bus and when you uninstall the PCI bus it reinstalls everything else. So I patiently waited and rebooted thinking it would simply disappear and my HD 4000 would work.

Nope, because the?AMD PCI Express (3GIO) Filter Driver is full of hate and demons and terrorizes laptops like a suicide bomber. Except it’s one that keeps coming back and exploding and you never die but you feel the pain over and over and over again. Sorry, it’s 2am right now …

Anyway. After reading about other peoples’ woes (all prior to 2012, and it’s 2015 now) I?discovered that AMD in their infinite wisdom had renamed the pcisys driver. This replaced the PCI bus driver. So what if I just tried to update the driver for the?AMD PCI Express (3GIO) Filter Driver in device manager? Hrm? So I did but I pointed it to my folder full of intel chipset drivers and BAM, it reverted to PCI bus, rebooted, and voila.