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Microsoft: No Driver Updates Allowed for Win7 and Win8

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Re: Microsoft: No Driver Updates Allowed for Win7 and Win8

#21

It's painful to repeatedly witness people voluntarily buy into ecosystems maintained by people with perverse incentives. You can't fault MS, making more money is their raison d'etre. If you care at all, even the smallest amount, explore the alternatives.

Microsoft did (still?) offer a free upgrade path from Windows 7/8 to Windows 10 for years so I doubt this is really for "getting money from our customers" but more "we want to stop supporting these old platforms at some point"

Re: Microsoft: No Driver Updates Allowed for Win7 and Win8

#22
post #13
post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As is often the case, the article renders fine with JavaScript and CSS disabled. This sort of scenario is why I run uMatrix in whitelist mode, with JS/CSS always disabled by default. These technologies are net negatives to me, I only enable them on select websites and my browsing experience is more pleasant on average because of it.

JS sure, but what benefit comes from disabling CSS? This is the first time I've heard of anyone doing so.

Often obnoxious stuff like headers that follow you down the page are implemented in CSS. It also neatly deals with sites using gray on white text, absurdly narrow text columns, etc. It also neuters most cookie notices and similar BS that uses CSS to block visibility of the article until you remove it with ublock origin's element zapper. Instead of zapping things all the time on each new site I visit, I nuke it first and ask questions later.

Re: Microsoft: No Driver Updates Allowed for Win7 and Win8

#23

It's painful to repeatedly witness people voluntarily buy into ecosystems maintained by people with perverse incentives. You can't fault MS, making more money is their raison d'etre. If you care at all, even the smallest amount, explore the alternatives.

There's no commercial vendor without "perverse incentives" if "making money" is on the list. Apple, Microsoft, Sony, Google, or anyone else. Essentially you're arguing that it is Linux or nothing, but in a very roundabout way.

Linux is not the only OSS Operating system. OpenBSD, FreeBSD exist, just off the top of my head

Re: Microsoft: No Driver Updates Allowed for Win7 and Win8

#24

It's painful to repeatedly witness people voluntarily buy into ecosystems maintained by people with perverse incentives. You can't fault MS, making more money is their raison d'etre. If you care at all, even the smallest amount, explore the alternatives.

This is nothing. My machine is on Windows 10 1909 but the May 2020 as well as the Oct 2020 Win 10 updates have both been held back because of Conexant driver incompatibility causing blue screen. MS stated back in June they are working with Synaptics to roll out an updated driver but we're nearly in Nov now and there has been no further announcement. Looks like they can't update the driver or the number of incompatible machines are low enough for them not to bother, essentially saying "upgrade your machine or just stay on 1909 till EOL, not our problem."

Drivers are a huge pain on both Windows as well as Linux. We're at 2020 now and still software development hasn't been able to separate drivers from the operating system, make them OS agnostic and easily updatable without all sorts of breakages.

Re: Microsoft: No Driver Updates Allowed for Win7 and Win8

#25
What Microsoft is doing should be illegal. If you buy a product, you should be able to use it throughout your lifetime or until the product naturally cease to operate. In this case, Microsoft should release an open source tool to cross sign the drivers if they don't want to support it or add an update that disables checking for signatures. If a company can disable software features in the future, then you are no buying the product but merely renting it. Imagine if you bought a car and then 5 years later company rep would come in and welded the wheels so that you wouldn't be able to upgrade your tires. That wouldn't fly, so why software companies are allowed to do this?

Re: Microsoft: No Driver Updates Allowed for Win7 and Win8

#26

It's painful to repeatedly witness people voluntarily buy into ecosystems maintained by people with perverse incentives. You can't fault MS, making more money is their raison d'etre. If you care at all, even the smallest amount, explore the alternatives.

There's no commercial vendor without "perverse incentives" if "making money" is on the list. Apple, Microsoft, Sony, Google, or anyone else. Essentially you're arguing that it is Linux or nothing, but in a very roundabout way.

Some are more perverse than others, depending on who their customer is.

Re: Microsoft: No Driver Updates Allowed for Win7 and Win8

#27
post #2

I don't see the issue here. If you're going to update your drivers for an antiquated OS, might as well just upgrade it im the process. Switching to Linux would also give you much more flexibility for long-term maintenance.

Why someone should install a new version of system that introduces all kind of spying and data harvesting just to use it as they used to? It's like saying oh you need to change the oil, why don't you buy a new car while at it?

Re: Microsoft: No Driver Updates Allowed for Win7 and Win8

#28
post #21

It's painful to repeatedly witness people voluntarily buy into ecosystems maintained by people with perverse incentives. You can't fault MS, making more money is their raison d'etre. If you care at all, even the smallest amount, explore the alternatives.

Microsoft did (still?) offer a free upgrade path from Windows 7/8 to Windows 10 for years so I doubt this is really for "getting money from our customers" but more "we want to stop supporting these old platforms at some point"

Windows Server 2012 R2 is impacted by this decision. It's still under support until 2023-01. They made the decision when they wanted to stop supporting the old platform already.

Re: Microsoft: No Driver Updates Allowed for Win7 and Win8

#29

What Microsoft is doing should be illegal. If you buy a product, you should be able to use it throughout your lifetime or until the product naturally cease to operate. In this case, Microsoft should release an open source tool to cross sign the drivers if they don't want to support it or add an update that disables checking for signatures. If a company can disable software features in the future, then you are no buyi…

Completely agree -- this is even worse for mobile phones, where often it's impossible to even upgrade the OS past the one it shipped with. The second a company stops supporting a product, they should be legally required to fully unlock the bootloader/drivers/etc.

Re: Microsoft: No Driver Updates Allowed for Win7 and Win8

#30

It's painful to repeatedly witness people voluntarily buy into ecosystems maintained by people with perverse incentives. You can't fault MS, making more money is their raison d'etre. If you care at all, even the smallest amount, explore the alternatives.

This is nothing. My machine is on Windows 10 1909 but the May 2020 as well as the Oct 2020 Win 10 updates have both been held back because of Conexant driver incompatibility causing blue screen. MS stated back in June they are working with Synaptics to roll out an updated driver but we're nearly in Nov now and there has been no further announcement. Looks like they can't update the driver or the number of incompatibl…

If you have an HP EliteBook G4 or similar: I noticed HP SoftPaq now has an updated Conexant driver that claims to work on Windows 10 2004 and 20H2 in its release notes. I installed that and forced an update using Windows 10 Update Assistant to 2004 and then 20H2. I haven't seen any bluescreens.
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