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Samsung: Don't install Windows 10 (theregister.co.uk)

Posted by msmash on from the curious-case-of-Windows-10-updates dept.

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.

23 of 186 comments (clear)

  1. Problem here seems to be Samsung? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Insightful

    Maybe if they weren't so far up Cook's ass, they'd take the time to write some new drivers. Or even write older drivers to spec, since they should work with Windows 10 too.

    1. Re:Problem here seems to be Samsung? by Austerity+Empowers · · Score: 5, Insightful

      Maybe if they weren't so far up Cook's ass, they'd take the time to write some new drivers. Or even write older drivers to spec, since they should work with Windows 10 too.

      In what way is Samsung up Cook's ass? I assume we're talking about Tim Cook, CEO of Apple, competitor to Samsung on many things including phones, tablets, laptops and PCs, and supplier on other things (SSDs, RAM).

      Samsung isn't going to be writing drivers for Broadcom chips, only Broadcom can do that. No doubt Broadcom would like to be paid for it, since they have recently exited the 802.11 business (http://www.macrumors.com/2016/03/18/apple-supplier-broadcom-wi-fi-chip-business/), they probably have let most of that staff go or re-org'd them on to something else. I'm sure that BCM is just one component lacking driver support, but outside of SSDs which don't usually need drivers, it is unclear that Samsung is on the hook to write any drivers at all, but would have to pay someone else to do it, and they don't want to because you've already spent that money and what's in it for them exactly?

      This is why linux people get so bent out of shape over proprietary drivers being a blight. Companies protect those secrets until one day they disappear into the mist, leaving us all holding the bag.

  2. Which one to laugh at more? by jeffb+(2.718) · · Score: 5, Insightful

    In this case, I think it's gotta be Samsung. Still no drivers after a year? Seriously?

    1. Re:Which one to laugh at more? by ledow · · Score: 5, Insightful

      Still no Windows 10 drivers after a year from release, for a cheap model of laptop they might have pushed out 5-7 years ago, which was only certified for Windows 7? Yeah, not really surprising.

      There are a LOT of manufacturer's out there committing exactly that "crime". It's got nothing to do with laziness - hell, in that time the manufacturer could have gone bankrupt - but it's got everything to do with the manufacturer just saying "that's an old chipset, we don't have 10 drivers. But for $50k...." and Samsung telling them to stick it up their bottom.

    2. Re:Which one to laugh at more? by ArchieBunker · · Score: 5, Insightful

      The reason is simple. You don't make money writing drivers for hardware you've already sold.

      --
      Only the State obtains its revenue by coercion. - Murray Rothbard
    3. Re:Which one to laugh at more? by MobyDisk · · Score: 4, Informative

      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.

    4. Re:Which one to laugh at more? by RogueyWon · · Score: 4, Informative

      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.

    5. Re:Which one to laugh at more? by Racemaniac · · Score: 3, Insightful

      Sure, let's just continue junking perfectly working hardware after a couple of years, i'm sure nature will be able to handle it (and those poor chinese workers that'll end up having to "recycle" it too)

    6. Re:Which one to laugh at more? by mrchaotica · · Score: 4, Funny

      I've been happily upgrading to Windows 10...

      I think your post was a lie, not because I think you're wrong about Samsung hardware support, but because Windows 10 is not an upgrade and no reasonable person install it "happily!"

      --

      "[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz

    7. Re:Which one to laugh at more? by SQLGuru · · Score: 5, Informative

      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.

    8. Re:Which one to laugh at more? by xxxJonBoyxxx · · Score: 4, Informative

      >> 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.)

    9. Re:Which one to laugh at more? by idontgno · · Score: 3, Funny

      Indeed, for they will not be on speaking terms with me after I render their PC essentially useless

      In other words, "problem solved."

      Jo Carson's Law of Competence: "Be careful what you get good at doin' 'cause you'll be doin' it for the rest of your life"

      idontgno's corollary: "If you don't want to do something for the rest of your life, be bad at it."

      --
      Welcome to the Panopticon. Used to be a prison, now it's your home.
    10. Re:Which one to laugh at more? by TemporalBeing · · Score: 5, Insightful

      The reason is simple. You don't make money writing drivers for hardware you've already sold.

      False. You don't directly make money writing drivers for hardware you've already sold.
      You do make money by encouraging buyers to come back due to your great support (including continuing to provide updated drivers) for products already sold.

      And yes, this is one reason why I haven't bought another tablet yet. I'm not seeing the kind of support I'd like to, even among higher end tablets.
      And yes, I especially would expect it with more traditional computers (laptops, desktops).

      --
      Truth is like the sun. You can shut it out for a time, but it ain't goin' away. - Elvis Presley (source: imdb.com)
    11. Re:Which one to laugh at more? by thegarbz · · Score: 4, Insightful

      Still no Windows 10 drivers after a year from release, for a cheap model of laptop they might have pushed out 5-7 years ago, which was only certified for Windows 7? Yeah, not really surprising.

      Really? Not surprising? How hard is it to make a driver work with a certain driver model? No serious question. I'm on Windows 10 using some hardware from the XP era. Now I understand maybe the argument for Samsung attempting to force upgrades, but in terms of effort I think this is a poor excuse.

    12. Re:Which one to laugh at more? by geoskd · · Score: 4, Informative

      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
    13. Re:Which one to laugh at more? by geoskd · · Score: 5, Insightful

      You do make money by encouraging buyers to come back due to your great support (including continuing to provide updated drivers) for products already sold.

      While nice sounding in theory, the marketing types have discovered through significant research that this simply isnt the case any more. People have very little brand loyalty these days. The few companies that are able to trade on it, do, but almost all of the established players burned their credibility long ago, and the cost of rebuilding that credibility is vastly more than the reputation would be worth. In short, electronics have become highly fungible. People don't expect them to last more than a few years, but they do expect them to be quite cheap. The few exceptions out there (like apple) are only one serious mis-step away from loosing their credibility and ending up wallowing in the mud with the rest of the players.

      --
      I wish I had a good sig, but all the good ones are copyrighted
    14. Re:Which one to laugh at more? by squiggleslash · · Score: 4, Insightful

      I wouldn't consider "Continuing to run it with Windows 7" "junking" the laptop...

      --
      You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.
  3. Samsung is too busy by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Interesting

    Samsung is too busy writing crappy replacements for all of the Google apps on Android, not updating their phones, screwing around with Tizen, etc. to both creating a proper set of drivers for their PCs. No surprise, they aren't good at updating anything they make. Oh, wait. They are good at adding advertisements to their older TVs: https://hardware.slashdot.org/...

  4. Plenty of Windows 10 comparibility by MobyDisk · · Score: 4, Informative

    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?

    1. Re:Plenty of Windows 10 comparibility by PRMan · · Score: 3, Informative

      Windows 8 does NOT support XP drivers. The driver model was changed in Vista. Maybe XP64 was ahead of the curve on that one, because it had a ton of driver issues rendering it nearly unusable, but for your average person on XP32, 8 has no guarantees whatsoever.

      --
      Peter predicted that you would "deliberately forget" creation 2000 years ago...
  5. Never Upgraded Windows on a Laptop by rpervinking · · Score: 4, Informative

    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.

  6. They're both right by Cro+Magnon · · Score: 3, Insightful

    We probably should avoid Windows 10. We should also avoid Samsung products.

    --
    Slow down, cowboy! It has been 4 hours since you last posted. You must wait another few hours.
  7. Why This Doesn't Surprise Me by mschwanke97402 · · Score: 3, Informative

    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.