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Windows 10's Automatic Updates For NVidia Drivers Causing Trouble
Mark Wilson writes: One of the features that has been removed from Windows 10 — at least for home users — is the ability to pick and choose when updates are installed. Microsoft has taken Windows Update out of the hands of users so the process is, for the most part, completely automated. In theory, this sounds great — no more worrying about having the latest patches installed, no more concerns that a machine that hasn't been updated will cause problems for others — but an issue with NVidia drivers shows that there is potential for things to go wrong. Irate owners of NVidia graphics cards have taken to support forums to complain that automatically-installed drivers installed have broken their computers.
Usually the problem is something like, "it isn't giving me the newest driver" or simply the poor quality of the drivers in the first place. (For awhile there, if I clicked on the start button, it would cause my screen to reset!) And a lot of "your driver stopped responding so we turned it off, then back on again."
In some ways, I like that the drivers are being pushed to me automatically, but at the same time, if I'm doing multiple reinstalls in a single day, I've already downloaded the drivers... I don't need them to be downloaded YET AGAIN, every install...
WARNING! This girl exceeds the MAXIMUM SAFE standards established by the FDA for BRATTINESS
...but an issue with NVidia drivers shows that there is potential for things to go wrong....
Given Microsoft's history of buggy Windows Update patches these past few months, I'd proffer that there is more than just a potential for things to go wrong. There is a likelihood that things will go wrong.
.
Microsoft really needs to up its game regarding the quality of the patches it is foisting upon the world.
To be fair, it's out in three days. You'd kind of hope that these things would be nailed by now!
disenfranchising users and using them as exploitable cannon fodder to be sucked on!
Who owns and controls my computer?
Some dork in a far away country living out his/her power trips or is it the insatiable, money greedy, total out of touch, higher-upper robot-C?O acting in delusion what needs to be done.
For chrissake, if you want to do anything on the hardware and software I paid for, kindly ask me and give me a choice.
Run fiddler on startup and see who has his dirty fingers in the box in your room.
Is this just a bad dream and when will it be over?
Um no, Windows should roll back to the working driver when the new one breaks, especially after 25 years of working on this kind of stuff! Anything that brings down the OS is the OS's fault.
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
"If you're unhappy that NVidea didn't do it right the first time, complain to them..."
Complaints aren't retroactive; the point is to prevent it from happening in the first place. I'm sure you would agree that *no one* should be expected to have the time, resources and knowledge to fix their own car, if the company that made it came by in the middle of the night and made it undriveable.
"...or get a different video card."
Not everyone has those kinds of resources.
With the diversity of systems running Windows, no realistic amount of testing will ever completely guarantee security updates are good. You still need a mechanism to decline known-flawed ones, and a mechanism for recovery and uninstallation the first time you get hit without warning.
In any case, the way Microsoft is going under Nadella, sadly it seems very unlikely they would do as you suggest. They are literally giving Windows 10 away free to huge numbers of people, and presumably they're going it because they want to be more like an Apple or a Google, picking up the revenues on the surrounding ecosystem, not just whatever they can find from the platform itself.
Those automatic updates would be the perfect way to show unavoidable nag messages to sign up for other Microsoft software and services, or those of their selected partners who they believe may be of interest to you, or to install spyware to feed back extra data, or to disable existing Windows feature that used to be free because some commercial interest makes getting you to pay for it a more promising option for them.
Not that I'm suggesting they'd ever do that sort of thing deliberately, of course. Maybe the Windows 7 update that has been nagging users about updating to Windows 10 itself was just an oversight.
If you disagree, post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like.
I remember this nonsense in college 15 years ago. Windows updates were a joke back then - surely the worlds largest software company has had time to sort out this issue.
I went from being a "windows guy" in college to the "anything but windows" guy now. Our company does run some windows servers in very limited roles, but everything else is Mac OS, Linux, or Chromebooks. We have 4 desktops running windows due to applications that only run on windows.
I put my family members on Mac OS or Chromebooks - and life has been much easier on me. No family members call me for help any more - it's fantastic.
Windows users need to take a hard look in the mirror and ask themselves why they are running that stuff. It most cases it is simply not necessary any longer.
Yep. Your comment speaks to a typo in the story. It says the driver update broke their computers. When it should have said the update broke Microsoft's computers.
You don't own what you don't control.
Always going to the most recent Nvidia drivers has been a risky proposition for years, on Win 7, Vista, XP etc.
Nvidia put out a lot of driver updates tied specifically to newly released high-profile games. In some cases, performance in those games will be pretty shocking if you don't move straight to the latest drivers. The PC release of GTA5 (in most respects a solid release) is one example. Sometimes, the drivers are fine. More often, they cause issues with a range of older applications and games. One recent driver update caused massive issues with .mkv playback, for instance (though a workaround was discovered fairly quickly).
The sensible thing to do is to upgrade your drivers only every few months and only move to versions that are generally recognized as stable and whose known issues have well-tested workarounds. Automatically moving to the latest version is a mug's game.
Sometimes the whole thing goes amusingly wrong. When id Software released Rage, it had horrible texture pop-in issues on most PCs with Nvidia cards. Why? Because id had expected Nvidia to put out a particular driver update in time for launch and Nvidia had gone with a different one instead.
This is yet another an example of the industry trend to make all personal computing devices, from desktop workstations to wrist-band gadgets, merely "dumb terminals" that are completely beholden to a distant server. Software will inevitably become a service that will be metered out by a distant authority like water or electricity.
Isn't this what RMS and the FSF have been warning about for many years?
I. for one, will now be giving more support to the ideals of RMS. This blatant expropriation of software and computing freedom by desperate corporate interests has got to be stopped.
Sorry, Microsoft, but I am the owner of my machine and not you:
sc config wuauserv start= DISABLED
drivers should still be option where security should be auto simple yet seemly inpossable for Microsoft..