Windows Update is getting better at saving your PC from buggy drivers
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jonbob_newcastle
Ars Scholae Palatinae
sigh There are days I really miss my Acorn, with its 5 second boot speeds (in the nineties) thanks to the OS fitting into 2MB of ROM. A full WIMP OS at that.
Today my bloody monitor crashes more often than my Acorn ever did.
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Before the complainer there were two mentions of Linux, in this thread. And one was just sort of in the context of mentioning that they don’t handle Windows problems anymore (I interpret this as just letting us know they are not super up-to-date on these issues).
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Back in the mists of the mid 1990s, I saw a demo of QNX booted off of a 1.44MB 3.5" floppy (< 1 minute) and then off of a ROM chip (~5 seconds). The demo had a color graphical windowed interface with mouse support (but I think I remember that the windows couldn't overlap), a graphical 2-pane ("Commander-like") file manager, a working web browser, a text editor, a CLI tool, and some other utilities. Truly impressive what optimization can get you if you focus on efficiency. It makes the crazy bloat of today's software truly shameful.
EDIT: This is what I remember, perhaps just an earlier version. It was definitely QNX.
http://toastytech.com/guis/qnxdemo.html
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So apparently, in some circles, "Operating System" means a "System of Regularly Operating on Your Computer."
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Managed both. MDM zero touch solutions for Macos work fine but they are nowhere near as seamless and straightforward as intune with autopilot
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First, yeah I had so many painful memories of borked driver updates I totally stopped updating drivers, period, unless something was already clearly broken.
Heck, I put up with faces looking ugly in Elite Dangerous for months, maybe years, even knowing a driver update would fix it. Finally I updated the driver because something else went wrong, and hey suddenly no one's wearing skull tattoos anymore!
Second, as the first comment so rightly asks, why the hell does this involve the cloud? Let me guess it requires a Microsoft Account too. Is there some technical reason (note: I did not say good) they couldn't stash the previous driver somewhere and revert if needed? (With or without reboot)
Also Microsoft kind of already does this with the QR codes on the blue screen of death, no? I mean I guess the idea is "Don't you people have phones?" but anyway.
Heck, I put up with faces looking ugly in Elite Dangerous for months, maybe years, even knowing a driver update would fix it. Finally I updated the driver because something else went wrong, and hey suddenly no one's wearing skull tattoos anymore!
Second, as the first comment so rightly asks, why the hell does this involve the cloud? Let me guess it requires a Microsoft Account too. Is there some technical reason (note: I did not say good) they couldn't stash the previous driver somewhere and revert if needed? (With or without reboot)
You jest, but JUST this morning, I tried to log into my work email and I got a prompt to enter a code which was sent to.... my work email.
Also Microsoft kind of already does this with the QR codes on the blue screen of death, no? I mean I guess the idea is "Don't you people have phones?" but anyway.
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Nora Lenderbee
Ars Tribunus Militum
There's a way to stop Windows 11 update from updating a driver with a specific device ID by setting a policy with GPEDIT.
Local computer policy
Computer configuration
Admin templates
System
Device Installation
Device Installation Restrictions
(policy) prevent install of devices that match device IDs.
You would need to search up details on how, and find your specific device IDs. It's a PITA, but I've managed to stop Windows Update from updating my graphic drivers for a situation much like you describe.
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Nora Lenderbee
Ars Tribunus Militum
Wouldn't the simple answer normally be to go into Device Manager and roll back that driver? (Of course this presumes that the 'borked' driver was installed properly and that Windows Update didn't remove the previous version from the driver store.)
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Windows is already and increasingly intrusive, so I don't really see that as a relative demerit.
Plus, you can still change the base OS, it's just a bit harder.
To paraphrase Fallout: New Vegas (probably among others): sometimes the only way to win is to not play.
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I wonder whether this was directly inspired by the Crowdstrike disaster. That was so bad that it had to have every engineer on the Windows team looking for ways to prevent a single bad driver from rendering the system unusable.
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There's always a way to get Windows to stop doing something.
...buried deep in the Registry or GPO, and subject to being arbitrarily reset when MS decides you didn't really mean to.
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How many computers in your house? Log in with one that uses Linux and download the older driver, transfer it to the Windows box, and downgrade the driver with it manually. You have an old computer running LInux, right?
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When will Windows Update start utilizing all (or at least more) of my computer's resources so the update doesn't take 20-30 minutes?
I have a pretty powerful machine but the updates just chug along using only a small fraction of available resources. The task manager indicates no bottlenecks.
Anyone know the reason for this?
I have a pretty powerful machine but the updates just chug along using only a small fraction of available resources. The task manager indicates no bottlenecks.
Anyone know the reason for this?
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Nope. Had to figure out why XPlane 11 had stopped working on my Mint 22.3 system yesterday. Turned out that something had switched the video driver for my Nvidia 950 card to a newer driver instead of the recommended one. Used the driver tool to switch to the recommended driver, rebooted, and all is working again. But it was an hour of panicked Googling before I got to that point.
Network, printer, and other drivers just work and have not caused any problems whatsoever.
Not awesome, but seems to be a lot more stable than Windows nowadays.
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It is a good idea to have a backup machine. And a test machine. And a few spare disk drives (HDD or SSD) for trying things out. Off lease laptops are ridiculously cheap and plentiful (check the auction sites) so I have several tucked away in drawers.
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Yes, because obviously the way to handle driver updates is with a second computer and a different OS.
As opposed to, I dunno, just making it possible to roll the driver back.
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Hey, wanna congratulate you for being the one to make me register
I'm sure you feel better now it's out of your system, but you're just being angry for angry's sake.
First you gotta look past the cloud moniker, it's just there for the layman.
As for the cloud in the other sense, Apple has had online full system recovery for a loong while now (thank you apple support site for saving me from an ungodly beating after bricking my dad's macbook pro without his knowledge) and it is a nice thing to have should all else fail - which this is anyway.
This is a step in a better direction for windows, where a lot of issues from OS corruption or other such computer bullshittery are "Hey buckaroo did you remember to make a windows usb? Do you have another device to make it on?
"Give Microsoft their lashes when it's due. They're trying, and you gotta give credit for the visible actions.
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This will 100% be used by nation states to install malware. Any process that runs 100% automatically without user intervention and install drivers "from the cloud" will be abused.
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That's the key sentence right there. When a driver has a problem and the company gives a damn, they publish a new driver that fixes the problem. Buggy drivers that exist long enough to be noticeable come from companies that don't give a damn so the rollback process will rarely if ever happen.
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I am looking into AMD these days for graphics. nVidia has screwed the golden pooch. They are basically an AI company now.
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i'll guess it's because if they gave Update more resources, people would complain MS is using all their resources to do updates.
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Er..uh...wasn't that what the Last Known Good Startup option did? I don't know why Microsoft feels the unrelenting need to complicate everything.
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I was thinking a slightly more intelligent/automatic version of that (to my knowledge, that's a blanket rollback as opposed to anything targeted?), but essentially yes. And I'm sure it's because somebody was trying to justify their sala... I mean, provide additional value to users. Yeah, that's it - for the users.
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Doubt if I'm first but here I am. W7 Pro was my last and it was good. After that, Linux as temporary. Somehow temporary became permanent.
For tgx, WinME was bad. Vista was literally crash-o-matic.
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Excellent news! Today, you get both of those evils for the price of one! Since both are, in fact, the same evil. See the recent Arsicle about bitlocker being broken by some weird NTFS transactional thing.
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They're definitely trying. Trying to make a good operating system that respects and (at least attempts to) meet its users' wishes and needs? Eeeeh, not so much.
Oh, man, yeah, lemme just tell my Silent Generation neighbor to go buy a cheap laptop to put Linux on. That way, the next time their mainstream, purchased-at-Costco-a-few-years-ago laptop that they depend on for email and managing finances is rendered completely unusable and unrecoverable by a routine Windows update, they can...what, exactly?
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Man, I had forgotten how much I miss the old GUI aesthetic until I clicked that link. Liquid glass is sexy and all (opinions may vary), but it lacks that certain je ne sais quoi...
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I think the quoi is "utility".
Fancy graphics are all fine and good, but it seems to me that the "fancy graphics" are starting to overtake "being useful" as major design considerations.
Stability, maintainability, and a few others are also issues, but they're deeper than the UI level.
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You can definitely, 100%, see what is and isn't a button, and windows have borders. The flat crap in today's UI still screws me up when I have several windows layered in a busy part of a monitor - I often grab the wrong one becuuse, without borders, the window edges often blend into a mishmash of status bars and menus. We now have millions of pixels on our screens; too bad we can't spare a few for a border now and then.
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