If Windows 11 ever gives you the option to 'eject' your GPU like a USB stick - don't do it

File this one under 'ludicrous experiments' (as well as improbable ones), but it turns out that if your GPU ever appears in the list of USB media that can be ejected from the taskbar in Windows, you really shouldn't try to do this.

But that's exactly what a foolhardy Redditor did - curious as to what the result would be - and hey, what do you know, but it ended up breaking the system (temporarily).

The first question you're likely to have is: How on earth did this happen in the first place? We've never had the option to eject our GPU like it was a USB stick, either, and apparently this is only served up in a virtual machine.

More specifically, as the Redditor explains, they were running a "Virtual Machine with PCIE passthrough under Proxmox" (an open source server solution), which is a very niche scenario to put it mildly.

Once the NVIDIA GTX 1050 Ti had been ejected, it was, unsurprisingly enough, not recognized anymore, and vanished from the system.

It took the experimenter an hour to fix the problem, and in case you're curious as to the solution, it runs as follows: "I deleted the GPU on my VM options, restarted the windows VM. Then I added it again before restarting the machine again. From there, windows detected it with problems and asked me to restart to fix the problem."

After that reboot, it was a simple matter of reinstalling the GPU driver and the NVIDIA graphics card was functional once again. (Presumably never to be 'ejected' again, too).