Slashdot Mirror
Samsung: Don't install Windows 10 (theregister.co.uk)
An anonymous reader shares an article on The Register: Samsung is advising customers against succumbing to Microsoft's nagging and installing Windows 10. The consumer electronics giant's support staff have admitted drivers for its PCs still don't work with Microsoft's newest operating system and told customers they should simply not make the upgrade. That's nearly a year after Microsoft released Windows 10 and with a month to go until its successor -- Windows 10 Anniversary Update -- lands. Samsung's customers have complained repeatedly during the last 12 months of being either unable to install Microsoft's operating system on their machines or Windows 10 not working properly with components if they do succeed. However, with the one-year anniversary fast approaching it seems neither of these tech giants have succeeded in solving these persistent problems.
The headline implies that Samsung is telling all their customers not to upgrade any equipment to Windows 10. But reading the article, it looks like one customer got one email saying this. If you follow the link in the article, and try a few models out, there are indeed models that support Windows 10.
In general though:
1. What Windows 8 drivers do not work on Windows 10?
Windows 8 was good about supporting Windows 7 drivers and even XP drivers. Video drivers art the ones that are usually an issue.
2. Does the Windows 10 upgrade check driver availability before upgrading?
This is a case of a bad headline and summary. The article refers only to one customer's laptop, but it makes it look like it applied to all laptops.
It's not just Samsung. If anything, I'd give Samsung at least some credit (compared to a couple of their competitors) for being willing to talk about this.
My parents have a ~5 year old Dell laptop. Back in November, they tried to move to Windows 10, but the machine locked into a BSOD-on-boot loop in the latter stages of the install. After a lot of digging into the problem, it turned out that the onboard graphics adapter for that particular model wasn't supported in Win10, so the OS crashed at the point it tried to initialise it. I had to travel 2 hours to get their PC to boot from the recovery partition and back into Windows 7.
On Monday, the parents must have missed a step in the "dodge the near-forced update" dance, because the laptop decided it was going to move itself to Windows 10 again while they were out - with exactly the same result. Cue another two hours on the phone talking my Dad through yet another restore from the recovery partition. I'm normally happy to blame the parents for their self-inflicted PC woes, but in this case, MS have made dodging the update so hard for the average user that I can't really bring myself to do so.
Their machine is not unique; it was from a fairly common line of low-end Dell laptops that was popular 5 years ago. There are plenty of similar tales in the Dell support forums.
For what it's worth, I'm running Win10 on my own home desktop and while I had to do a bit of router-fettling to block the worst of the telemetry, I actually like the OS for day to day use. But then, I have a PC that can run it.
Samsung has a long history of making their computer hardware slightly non-standard.
Just enough that generic drivers don't recognize the Samsung versions as compatible.
(They change PCI Vendor ID's and Hardware ID to custom values.
In some cases they wire the chips in a non-standard way. E.g. a Wifi chip with 4 antenna's only has antenna 3 and 4 attached in stead of 1 and 2 as the manufacturer recommends. Bluetooth or Wifi enable switch is wired in reverse so on Samsung ON means OFF.)
And their own Windows 7/8 drivers which, on their own, would work without issue in Windows 10 don't install on 10 because their setup programs explicitly test for the OS version and simply abort with a "non-supported OS" message.
In some cases you can extract the actual driver from the setup and install it manually but for most users that is just too much voodoo required.
The only party interested in having Windows work well on their laptop is the manufacturer, and that only until the thing is sold. After that, forget it. And laptop hardware is crazy, with a different chip being switched into the middle of the production run because it saves them maybe 10 cents per unit. And they fix the driver to match. For the version of Windows they expect to be installing for initial sale. Period. So I just take whatever the damned thing comes with and leave it alone. That approach has worked for me since 1997 (Thinkpad 765D with Windows 95) and I'm sticking with it.
I have a 6yo laptop (Dell, not Samsung) that is on the "Windows 10 not supported" list for Dell and Win10 works just fine. Bash them all you want, but MS does a decent job of supporting really old hardware......in spite of the manufacturers not updating their drivers.
>> Windows 10 is not an upgrade and no reasonable person install it "happily!"
"Happily" because the start-up time (especially on old machines) is worth the upgrade. I typically use these machines to hop on line, stream a movie or some TV episodes down to a TV, and that's about it. The automatic updates don't bother me - I want those because I sometimes access some pretty shady sites to get my material - and I know how to turn the telemetry information off. And what I really want - the ability to run this hardware until it dies, rather than Microsoft eventually pulls patch support for Windows 7/8 - is now a couple of years closer to reality.
The only thing I don't understand is no Vista->Windows 10 upgrades. Some of my machines really are that old, and I'm considering burning some of the Windows 7 licenses I never used just to get those rebuilt and into the modern era. (Meanwhile, I'm teaching my kids about Raspberry Pi-based Linux systems and getting them to do as much work as they can on Google docs, so hopefully Windows 10 will be the last Windows generation my home network has to support.)
I have a 6yo laptop (Dell, not Samsung) that is on the "Windows 10 not supported" list for Dell and Win10 works just fine. Bash them all you want, but MS does a decent job of supporting really old hardware......in spite of the manufacturers not updating their drivers.
6 years old is not "really old", even in the PC world. come back and talk when the new software works with hardware older than a decade.
It should also be noted that continuing to support old hardware is really not all that difficult, as long as you have a compatibility layer that can interact with the old drivers (which MS does). It allows them to re-use almost all of their old drivers. The only reason most of this hardware remains on the "not windows 10 ready" list is because absolutely no one intends to ever test any of it to validate that it really does work right. Theres no money in it for anyone except Microsoft, why would anyone else waste their time and money, and Microsoft could blow away a billion dollars testing just the relatively common hardware out there, and it would not add very much value to their product, so they don't bother either.
I wish I had a good sig, but all the good ones are copyrighted
Samsung, in general, have proven to me that they are not interested in after-the-sale product support. My first, and only, Samsung phone (early Android) saw no more updates within a year after its release date. The $1000 Samsung laptop I bought for Christmas in 2012 with Windows 7 never saw a proper set of Windows 8/8.1 drivers and there are no Windows 10 drivers at all.