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Comment by Nextgrid | Hacker News Reader

I think his point is that he shouldn't have to do that and I agree with that.

System updates have been a mostly solved problem since Windows XP (or maybe earlier) and I don't recall updates outright deleting installed software until Windows 10 came out.

Windows 10 obviously uses a different update model (it's essentially a full OS reinstall) but this model should've been developed taking into account the requirements of the old one, and I think "leave installed software/drivers alone" is a very important one.

Releasing a half-baked implementation that is worse than the old one is very sloppy. To the eyes of the user it doesn't matter how "good" the underlying details is (I guess the new model does have some advantages on a technical level), if it wipes out existing software and makes certain peripherals not work it's an overall negative and shouldn't have been released.

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I believe the issue is that since the printer is so old, there is no driver available for Windows 10. Checking the HP site, the latest is for Vista from 2008, so dragons are to be expected when you run with drivers on an OS that isnt listed as being compatible with significant architectural changes.

I dont think its fair to blame the OS here and in this case you may get a better experience, and maybe security (removing those old HP background processes running with elevated privileges) using microsofts generic postscript printer drivers.

The problem here doesn't seem to be the driver. The driver appears to be working once installed. The problem is that the driver gets removed every time a major system update is installed. The update system used to be fine in this regard and they decided to rewrite it in such a way that it doesn't keep existing drivers even if they appear to be compatible.

Exactly. The driver once installed works perfectly. It's Windows update blowing it away that is the problem.

> https://kb.ucla.edu/articles/hp-laserjet-1012-and-windows-10

As stated in a previous comment, you're installing drivers for another model of printer. So I find it unreasonable to believe there wont be problems down the line even if they appear to be working.

HP has a Universal Print Driver that will support your printer and be compatible with Windows 10 with out resorting to installing drivers meant for another printer. Not exactly a high prority test case for Microsoft.

> you're installing drivers for another model of printer

That shouldn't be the OS's decision to make. The user wanted his machine to install something, and the something even worked fine after install.

Are you advocating for the OS deleting files/software that it considers "wrong" without explicitly asking the user?

Besides that, the driver appears to be fully compatible because it works fine once reinstalled. It would be one thing if the driver just stopped working (because the printing driver API changed, which is fair enough for a decades-old printer), but in this case it's not about API incompatibility but a broken update system.

The driver works fine. It's a black laser printer, there isn't any fancy feature to have problem with. It prints what I tell it to print.

> HP has a Universal Print Driver that will support your printer and be compatible with Windows 10

The last time I checked, none of the official driver on the vendor website worked, nor the automatic driver that Windows installed. I mean that would be the obvious first thing people check when their devices don't work... For me using those drivers just printed out an error.

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