Removal of unwanted drivers from Windows Update

https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/blog/hardwaredevcenter/removal-of-unwanted-drivers-from-windows-update/4425647

by zdw • 1 year ago

51 52 1 year ago

techcommunity.microsoft.com

How about first fixing, that Windows update is automatically installing inappropriate drivers for my graphics card, causing system instability and freezes? How about first fixing your shit, MS?

greggsy• 1 year ago

GPU drivers are some of the most complex and frequently updated pieces of code in the industry.

I blame the manufacturers for failing to deliver stable products, rather than putting all the blame on windows for delivering drivers to you that were submitted to them by the manufacturer through WHQL arrangements.

cubefox• 1 year ago

GPU drivers also routinely fix buggy or inefficient shader code in individual computer games, at least for popular ones. GPU drivers are doing more than what would reasonably expected of them.

zelphirkalt3• 1 year ago

I think this is somewhat misunderstanding my complaint. When I download the AMD drivers directly from AMD websites, they are fine mostly. It is just that Windows every now and then decides to replace them with the shit that comes with Windows update. I never tell it to do that and it acts in such an idiotic way.

londons_explore3• 1 year ago

MS could easily say "If users with your driver installed have more than a 10% higher reboot/app crash/windows reinstall/BSOD rate than typical users, then your company will be fined $1 per computer affected per month till the issue is resolved.".

Suddenly every company would be putting loads more effort into battle testing their drivers when there is a financial cost to buggy code.

shakna2• 1 year ago

I think instead every company would suddenly be releasing their own Linux or BSD, and/or lobbying the government to break Microsoft up for being a monopoly. It'd be cheaper.

thrownaway5612• 1 year ago

You can turn that off and not have drivers installed through Windows Update.

https://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/forum/all/disabl...

zelphirkalt3• 1 year ago

What an intuitive way to wrench back control over installed drivers. Thank you, anyway.

kotaKat• 1 year ago

Does this include going back through and ensuring they're removing malicious drivers left behind (like from the FTDI driver-bricking fiasco... numerous times over)?

neuroelectron• 1 year ago

Yes, I have business justification. Wink wink

We do the eavesdropping and act as a liability shield. Here's our "debug" mode and a bit extra for the effort.

proactivesvcs• 1 year ago

"What category of drivers are targeted in the first cut of the cleanup?

The first phase targets legacy drivers that have newer replacements already on Windows Update."

It'd be useful if they listed information about the other phases; the proposal for this phase seems pretty sensible and I'm surprised they have only now started thinking about it.

londons_explore3• 1 year ago

To my knowledge, windows update always only offers the latest version of a driver for a bit of hardware...

Is there even a UI for a user to select an older driver version from windows update?? I know you can do it if you manually get a .inf file, but thats a different flow.

If not, what exactly is this announcement saying? "Stuff that a user isn't able to install right now won't be available for a user to install in the future"?

ninjaoxygen• 1 year ago

At the very least Windows Update can offer you two versions, a stable version of the driver and a newer but potentially less stable version through the "Optional Driver Updates" page in Windows Update.

BrandoElFollito• 1 year ago

That would require the vendor to provide such versions. I do not think I ever saw that

Maxious• 1 year ago

https://www.catalog.update.microsoft.com still lives in it's 2000s glory

keyringlight• 1 year ago

I'd be interested to know what effort would be needed to decouple the manual download database from what is connected to WU within currently supported versions of windows, presumably they've already got some way of filtering off which drivers they want to keep live. I think MS could handle the download cost of old drivers when a lot of them can be smaller than an average modern webpage.

I guess it comes down to the question of how much MS cares about old hard/software past its support window, versus delegating that to third party sites like vogons.org and praying someone has the relevant file still available.

Dma54rhs• 1 year ago

I don't think its necessarely latest but what they deem to be most stable, which is not what the end user always wants.

reginald78• 1 year ago

Nor is it always the most stable. I've had update overwrite my working video card driver and replace it with one that blackscreens on reboot.

silon42• 1 year ago

What of windows 10 drivers?

mystified5016• 1 year ago

It does not. In my experience it always gives drivers that are at least 6-12 months old. Particularly GPU drivers.

Drivers for other random things like disk controllers are likely to be a lot older.

I can't recall ever checking a WU provided driver and not having to immediately go fetch an updated version from the vendor directly.

rkagerer2• 1 year ago

Great. So if I interpret this correctly, when companies go out of business (or drop support for product lines), your perfectly functional hardware will now inevitably stop working (or not be installable after you reformat your OS). Welcome another step down the path toward a world where you don't really own your hardware and your vendor dictates how, when and what you can use ("we control the horizontal, we control the vertical").

There are already some great comments in that thread, like this thoughtful one:

While having a well organized and updated driver catalog is undoubtedly a good thing, please spare a thought for curators of vintage PC collections. The Windows Update Driver catalog is a near unrivaled resource on the internet for known good drivers, and is a great source for drivers where the original manufactures have either removed the drivers from their own websites, or they no longer exist.

Personally I always hated the idea of using Windows Update as your warehouse for drivers in the first place. Much better to keep your own collection. (Yes, it takes some work to curate and periodically update).

neilv2• 1 year ago

Here's a PC driver bundle that runs great, without artificially forced obsolescence: https://cdimage.debian.org/debian-cd/current/amd64/iso-dvd/

DougN7• 1 year ago

Just curious if Linux includes drivers for 20 year old hardware and if there is some guarantee somewhere that old drivers will be available forever.

Nullabillity• 1 year ago

That wouldn't help retrocomputing users at all, who are specifically trying to reproduce specific software/hardware combinations. If that old setup required Windows, well.. guess they need Windows and those specific drivers.

thrownaway5612• 1 year ago

Nothing is stopping for from making your own and gifting it to the world. You can't support old things forever. Eventually you have to move forward as the cost for maintaining things just doesn't support the effort (or the juice isn't worth the squeeze).

perching_aix2• 1 year ago

OK, I'll bite.

Software is a liability. Especially the typical kind, that one normally runs into, which are not formally verified. And even if they were, the human understanding of what constitutes a vulnerability is in perpetual flux, as that is a human-level semantic concept.

This is why active maintenance is a necessary property. If a software is not actively maintained, it can and will accumulate vulnerability discoveries, putting the entire security boundary it resides in and all the data going through it into jeopardy. To potentially autonomously distribute knowingly unmaintained software borders on malicious.

It sucks that your legacy devices will no longer have their device drivers neatly auto-installed, yes, but it's not some grand conspiracy, it's bottom of the barrel bare minimum safety consciousness.

If what you propose is that manual install specifically should still be possible from Windows Update, I can support that, but I think this entire announcement is such an obvious thing, I'm surprised it hasn't been this way before.

Personally I always hated the idea of using Windows Update as your warehouse for drivers in the first place. Much better to keep your own collection. (Yes, it takes some work to curate and periodically update).

And most every other person hates dealing with drivers instead, hence why they started distributing them through it.

mslansn• 1 year ago

Errrr, you can install drivers outside of windows update. Your hardware will continue working fine. Just that you will have to install the driver manually.

maltris• 1 year ago

Good luck finding them still. If they are not on archive.org, you are out of luck. And if that ceases to exist, even more.

immibis• 1 year ago

It's not a step towards that world. We're already in that world. Have been for at least half a decade.

Havoc• 1 year ago

Seems like this would result in a ton of printers etc hitting landfills

guidedlight• 1 year ago

Would it? Printers are a great example. Almost every printer made in the last 20 years supports at least PCL6 perfectly fine.

Why do we still need thousands of proprietary drivers, when just one will do?

Removal of unwanted drivers from Windows Update

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