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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.
This is exactly the sort of thing everyone predicted would happen with enforced automatic updating. It is exactly the sort of reason people argued against taking control out of users hands. I just didn't expect we'd see an example of it before Windows 10 was actually released though. For once Microsoft has proven itself to be ahead of the curve. Yay?
While Microsoft Update has generally been something good for Windows (and the Internet) by reducing the number of vulnerable machines, it has not been without its share of programs. There are countless stories of Update pushing bad patches and drivers, and quality-control at Microsoft has apparently taken a turn for the worse in the last couple of years. Nobody is arguing that Microsoft should stop pushing patches or even that the default - especially for home users - should be to automatically download and install the patches. But by removing the user's ability to ultimately accept or decline these patches benefits nobody.
But I guess Microsoft wasn't satisfied with just having a reputation for producing shoddy products that don't work as intended; now they seem to be working towards earning the reputation for creating a product that intentionally goes out of its way to break itself.
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!”
Windows 10, the best Windows ever:
http://i.imgur.com/5F3zkCC.jpg
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.
That is how it has been until now, for Windows 10 insider that most certainly is not the case.
"I have downloaded hundreds and hundreds of records, why would I care if somebody downloads ours?" Robin Pecknold
I normally spend my time on my computers in the company of a Linux distribution, but since I'm a retired "Windows Janitor", I get bugged a lot to "take a look" at friends/neighbors machines. Since the last version of Windows I spent any great amount of time with was XP, I figured I'd better see what all the hoopla was about Windows 8/8.1. I came into a retail copy of 8.1 instead of $$$ for some work I did on a neighbors system, so I figured I'd grab a spare laptop drive and install it so I could get familiar with it, so as not to come off as derpy when the inevitable calls on 8.1/10 start hitting my phone. The install was as smooth as silk, and the system looked/worked fine, after installing the MANDATORY ClassicShell. The inevitable WU notification came and told me I had 100+ updates, so I turned it loose to do its thing.. Once the updates installed, and a reboot, I logged into the system and KABLOOOIE.. right after login, one of the new-style BSOD's telling me there was a video_tdr_failure in one of the pieces of the Nvidia driver that WU forced down my systems throat.. After some googling to find that MS, in its infinite wisdom, had changed the old "F8" to get to safemode, I managed to figure it out and installed the latest/greatest from the Nvidia website, which made the Quadro FX770M in my system happy... Now I hear that MS, once again, in its infinite wisdom, is gonna take away the capability of permanently skipping crap updates in Windows 10, I'm getting close to the point of heading back to Linux, and telling friends that "if you want my help, you get rid of Windows and use Linux"....
THANK YOU, Edward Snowden!! Americans owe you a debt of gratitude (whether they know it or not..)
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.
Yup. The current "preview" build, 10240, is the RTM build. For all intents and purposes, Windows 10 is in its final release form.
In any case, given the history of these things, it's inevitable that Microsoft is going to push out an automatic update that massively screws up millions of machines. At the point, the very next update they're going to push out is an update that disables automatic updates.
Does it make you happy you're so strange?
Irate owners of NVidia graphics cards have taken to support forums to complain that automatically-installed drivers installed have broken their computers.
That would be 17 posters on the NVIDA GeForce drivers forum. Windows 10 Display Driver Feedback Thread
Interestingly the problem has also been experienced by Forbes contributor Paul Monckton who has done some digging and explained to me that the fault lies in a conflict between Windows Update and Nvidia's own driver and software management tool the 'Nvidia GeForce Experience'.
Many PC components and peripherals come with bundled software that automatically manages driver updates already. PC makers also often bolt on driver update management software onto their PCs (Lenovo is a notable example) which then has the potential to conflict with driver updates delivered by Windows Update.
''It looks like driver version 353.54 [the latest at time of writing] is available only via Window Update,'' Monckton told me. ''The problem is the Nvidia GeForce Experience then tried to downgrade that to the previous version while claiming the previous version was actually newer.''
The problem is compounded by the fact that Windows Update doesn't actually reveal driver version numbers prior to install or warn the user in advance so pinpointing something that has suddenly caused problems can be hard to identify.
Given Windows 10 updates cannot be stopped the most obvious solution is to uninstall third party driver management and hand it all over to Windows Update to avoid clashes. This potentially simplifies matters by providing an all-in-one update service, but it does mean taking away control from specialist companies over their own products.
Windows 10 Automatic Updates Start Causing Problems
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.
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.
KB3035583 is love. KB3035583 is life.
The first KB# I ended up memorizing after having to rip it off dozens of friends and families PCs (and yes the first time each and every last one requested I do so)
About a quarter of those on Pro versions. So much for controlling updates there either.
Control Panel -> System -> Hardware tab -> Device Installation Settings
Then just set it to "Never install driver software from Windows Update."
I have a GTX 560 ti, and a couple of years ago, Nvideo released a driver that hosed that particular card with occasional lockups and general meltdowns. Hardware acceleration in Firefox, for instance, would cause the driver to glitch badly enough to require a reboot. Although Nvidia eventually did track it down and fix it, it took quite a few months to do so. I had to monitor their user forums to wait for a fix, and only then could I safely patch once it was confirmed by testers.
My computer would have been near unusable had the latest updates been forced on me. Microsoft really needs to rethink this. Patching automatically works fine as a default for home users, but there HAS to be a way to defer, roll-back, or opt-out of specific patches - especially anything that isn't security-related, like drivers. Patching an entire OS is not as simple as patching a browser. You know they're looking at the Chrome model here, which was actually somewhat controversial when it launched. This is a "we know what's best for you, so you don't have a choice anymore" model, and while it will be fine for *most* people, we've already seen that it can cause problems for *some*.
Irony: Agile development has too much intertia to be abandoned now.
Note: I saw an AC mention you could turn off automatic downloading of drivers, so I checked it out. Keep in mind my Windows 10 version is out of date, though. so the RTM may be different.
Go to Control Panel -> System, then click on "Change Settings"
Under the Hardware tab, you can click on a button called "Device Installation Settings"
You're then asked "Do you want Windows to download driver software and realistic icons for your devices?
* Yes (recommended)
* No
Unless this changes for launch, it looks like people will have a way to opt out of automatic driver updates, so that's a good thing. Still, damn... they really buried that setting deep.
Irony: Agile development has too much intertia to be abandoned now.
Microsoft has had some really bad track records with patches as of late. They've trashed Outlook 2010 no less than four times this year, it's gotten so bad we've had to disable updates company wide. I actually had one use request a downgrade to Office 2007 since Microsoft didn't seem to break that one. After the third mass break this year it's gotten to the point that I outright ban any patch labeled Outlook when I update a system with 2010 on it.
Come on Microsoft, I didn't have a huge amount of trust in you to begin with. Publicly address this chain of fail and promise you'll cut it out to restore some faith.
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Not sure why the question mark. What don't you understand?
The category of "optional" updates has gone away, and is instead replaced with the ability to disable driver or application downloads. This is roughly the same in practice, but is slightly less flexible.
The disadvantage with the new mechanism is that you can't pick and choose among the "optional" updates. Say you wanted to update your audio and mouse drivers, but not your video drivers (since you prefer to update them using Nvidia's app to do so).
The advantage of the new system is that you can choose to automatically update what used to be an optional update, and those had to be manually applied, if I remember correctly. Some people may also prefer to have both their drivers and applications automatically updated. It's a bit friendlier for typical users at the expense of the power-users.
I'd like to see that "driver downloads" setting moved to the main Windows Update settings page, where people are more likely to find it.
Irony: Agile development has too much intertia to be abandoned now.
Well, shit. Someone else informed me that the option to disable updating of drivers is ONLY when you insert new hardware. So, you typically wouldn't want to disable this.
It looks like this may still be an issue then. Damn, that's a really misleading setting name. Sorry for the misinformation.
Irony: Agile development has too much intertia to be abandoned now.