Here's the Windows 10 driver problem explained. And it doesn't help.

[Alaric]

https://uk.news.yahoo.com/fix-windows-10-driver-problems-181709439.html And yes, Yahoo is the fudzilla of "journalism". Still an interesting read. Unfortunately, it doesn't actually address the problem of how badly M$ handles these problems with their mandatory breaking of your OS.

 

[EarthDog]

Hasn't broken any of my pcs yet!

 

[Alaric]

It seems to be hit and miss, for sure. As a purely anecdotal observation, it seems to affect more people with legacy hardware (which fits the scenario presented) or hardware that may be currently produced, but has been produced without changes for a long time. "Long" being just a wee bit subjective. LOL Where the forced driver updates would affect me would be wanting to keep my current nvidia drivers because an update would leave me with GFE, which I would then have to uninstall. Unless I have a good reason to need more than the hundreds of fps I already get from my games with the current drivers. The forced update may not break anything (may not, no guarantee there) but it would indeed cause me extra work and annoyance for no good reason other than M$ wants to.

 

[notarat]

I've avoided W10 like the plague due to having to load non-certified drivers to allow my computers to talk to my 3D Printers. If they've changed the forced driver installs to be de-selectable I'll be very happy.

 

[Dermen]

I had a driver issue with my old Win8.1 laptop. The touchpad driver for 8.1 had back/forward gestures. The Win10 driver did not so I would use the MS tool to block the driver update, but it would only ignore the new driver for a month or so. Eventually Asus came out with a Win10 driver that had the back/forward gestures as an option but it wasn't for my specific laptop, so Win10 would try to install the older Win10 driver.

 

[mackerel]

I've had a driver fight between Intel and MS on some Core 2 era Win10 systems. Windows Update will install MS' choice, which is a lower version than the one Intel offers. The statement they sort by date before version could explain that, and makes me wonder why they don't use the version before date?

 

[machausta]

I had a driver issue with my old Win8.1 laptop. The touchpad driver for 8.1 had back/forward gestures. The Win10 driver did not so I would use the MS tool to block the driver update, but it would only ignore the new driver for a month or so. Eventually Asus came out with a Win10 driver that had the back/forward gestures as an option but it wasn't for my specific laptop, so Win10 would try to install the older Win10 driver.

I had the EXACT same issue on my wife's Asus K75VJ. They did eventually stop trying to kill the driver that actually worked.

 

[Kenrou]

How long was "eventually" ?

 

[notarat]

This should help explain the date versus version issue

https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20170208-00/?p=95395

 

[Alaric]

Except it doesn't always all work out in the end. That's not even wishful thinking or blind optimism, it's patently untrue and M$ knows it. The Windows 10 driver nonsense has broken thousands of computers, the web is rife with horror stories on the subject. It hasn't been a secret just here at OCF.

This is really bad, because if the Windows driver has a newer timestamp, suddenly all the custom drivers provided by the PC manufacturer get replaced (and if this sounds familiar, it's because this has been a huge issue plaguing consumers with the Windows 10 operating system since it launched in June 2015).

"They desperately want Windows to be as user-friendly as macOS in this area, but the reality is that Windows runs on heterogeneous hardware and in practical terms, it just doesn't work. Right now forcing one particular driver over another is an exercise in pain and uncertainty. You never know if tomorrow you'll wake up to your microphone not working (again) because of an overnight update. It's silly. Just give end users a friendly interface and stop the nightmares."

The story I linked to is more revealing of the problems, even though it contains Microsoft's entertaining view of events.

 

[trents]

In my customer base Windows 10 has broken components like bluetooth and Wifi adapters on a number of occasions. I can often download and replace the Windows 10 driver with the Windows 7 driver to get things working again but it gets kicked out with the next round of updates.