Microsoft Kills Windows 10's Automatic Driver Search | Hacker News Reader

Microsoft Kills Windows 10's Automatic Driver Search

makeuseof.com

37 pointssharjeelsayed30 comments

That sucks. I much preferred the drivers Windows automatically finds over navigating shitty vendor websites that break their links every other year and sometimes just take down all drivers for some of their product.

It also takes away some of the power Microsoft had over hardware manufacturers regarding driver quality; the WHQL program has only improved driver quality in my experience. Of course companies like NVIDIA encourage you to use their website version that doesn't need to pass all the quality checks because it's faster, preferably by making you sign up and letting them track what you do on your computer with some of their spyware, but that doesn't take away from the fact that Microsoft-sanctioned drivers are usually much more reliable and secure than random downloads a vendor decides to throw on their website.

It also makes a lot of older hardware useless. Microsoft's database contains many more drivers for less common, cheaper brands than vendors' websites, especially when the devices in question is older than three years and they'd much rather have you buy a new laptop than give you a driver for the motherboard.

I too have been bitten by the random software popup when plugging in a "gaming" mouse from Logitech, but I think it's wrong to blame Microsoft for the shitty software their vendors throw online. Microsoft judges drivers on stability and code quality rather than weird features like side programs, so if Logitech asserts that their customers want to use the program to use all the drivers' features, then who are they to object?

As its written in the article this doesn't remove what you're talking about - the mechanism for driver updates is now Windows Update. And it works rather well - my Razer laptop pulled all of its drivers immediately from Windows Update with no manual faffing needed.

This is only about the Device manager integrated function which is really now a duplicate of Windows Update version.

The problem with that is that the Device Manager feature is simple and understandable. When I install or reconfigure a driver and want to pull a driver from Windows Update, I can specifically start the update client for that device and see when it's done.

With Windows Update I just have to believe that it'll look for drivers at some point. There's no direct feedback anymore.

It would be so easy to implement as switch for something like this. It is like Microsoft really tries to not give users a choice these days.

I think part of this is because Microsoft already has mountains of barely used legacy code they need to support. With every choice they remove, they can remove some of it, or at least make sure it doesn't grow.

It is so easy to dismiss Microsoft's actions as malice or laziness rather than consider why they actually might be doing something.

They have, and it works well. Also, you don't have to use it so they do it fact give you a choice.

> That sucks. I much preferred the drivers Windows automatically finds over navigating shitty vendor websites that break their links every other year and sometimes just take down all drivers for some of their product.

I think you're conflating at least 2 other Windows features with the one removed.

Microsoft didn't get rid of the database of WHQL drivers that ship with Windows, they didn't get rid of the Windows Update mechanism for updating those drivers.

They got rid of the feature to search online for a driver when Plug-And-Play setup fails or when you manually go into the Device Manager and click the Update Driver button on a device.

The only time I've seen this feature kick in was when I plugged in a brand new GPU or random microcontroller board (e.g. Digispark). In either case it failed. I honestly don't recall the feature ever working.

I've had this feature fix many problems for family members with broken (and usually cheap) laptops. Uninstall the existing driver, pull the official one down from Microsoft.

It also helped me update some drivers that hadn't come in via Windows Update yet for some weird USB device, probably because it wasn't plugged in when the update process ran.

> Uninstall the existing driver, pull the official one down from Microsoft.

Are you specifically selecting that search option after it fails to install a driver? If you're just uninstalling the vendor provided drivers, removing the vendor drivers from disk, and redetecting the hardware then Windows might just be pulling a WHQL driver off disk that it already has.

Most Windows installs come with a cache of WHQL drivers for common devices, companies like Synaptics, Realtek, etc will provide a single driver that supports most of their devices. In rare cases where you have a device with limited storage (e.g. a cheap tablet) then it might not have those drivers, but that's not the norm.

It appears most people here have't read the article. Unlike what the title states, Windows is not losing the ability to automatically find drivers. Take note of this bit:

> The option to manually browse your PC for a driver is still present. You can also still update your drivers via Windows Update. The update only prevents the Device Manager from using the internet to update your drivers.

Every time when I clicked Automatic Search it searched for ages and found nothing. I knew something was wrong with it.

It is mind boggling that Microsoft after all the years with dealing with the OS couldn't make it work.

It is mind boggling how smart and clear thinking people want so badly to dump on Microsoft, to the degree that it blinds them to objective reality. Auto driver update functionally is now in windows update and it works well. This is mentioned in the article. They are killing this because it's broken and they don't need it.

Actually, starting with Windows 10 Release 2004, all device manufacturers will be able to mark driver updates as automatic, while optional driver updates will appear within an "Optional updates" area of Windows Update. This obsoletes the tedious search for driver updates within Device Manager.

Source: https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/hardware-dev-center/s...

Driver search seems like a relatively simple collective action problem that the OS provider is well-positioned to solve. It seems like all that's necessary is to extract an identifier for the device and have a repository of (operating-system, identifier) -> driver that device manufacturers can upload to.

I guess it's the extras that kill things. Product differentiators like applets, software utility suites etc. probably make drivers less than simple modules, and more like installable software packages. It's in the OS vendor's interest to commoditize this and make devices generic, but not in the device manufacturers' interests.

This is essentially what Linux does. The “driver repository” is just the kernel source.

Only for the FOSS drivers. Which often suck.

Almost all the drivers on Linux are FOSS. I’ve never owned a device that needs closed drivers (other than phones and dear god do those drivers suck balls) but I’ve heard some pretty bad things from friends and people on the internet who have had to tolerate closed GPU drivers.

No because the drivers that come with the default install (that automatically get installed when you plug in the device, even when offline) contain all that crap as well. It wouldn’t even be the first time if these become incompatible and cause blue screens after a Windows Build upgrade.

On the basis that 90% of the time when it did go off to the 'internet' (aka some Microsoft site) to find drivers it would spend hours doing it to only come back with nothing, it's been pretty useless for some time now.

One wonders if it's been broken for ages, and MS have finally decided to put it out of it's misery.

Occasionally Windows 10 Update will bump my graphics card driver and I'll need to go off to nVidia and get the proper latest version which isn't just a bare bones driver.

When it works, it's not even necessarily what you want.

My experience has been that that particular option was pointless as if there was compatible drivers it would have found and installed them without manual intervention anyway.

I really liked the feature, Once on my win7, I installed a cheap plug-n-play network card with realtech microcontroller. Assuming,it will work outof box. It didn't. Then I just used my mobile for usb tethering, quickly launch the automatic search from settings and thats all. It found the needed drivers automatically.

Might be a good thing - once to my horror it just installed some manufacturer crapware when I plugged in a new mouse, and it did so without asking for permission. The software was the type of thing that makes you sign up for an account so you can adjust DPI and make it do weird things with colours. This was a few years back and hopefully this change means the end of stuff like that.

I think when working with a piece of hardware that requires a specific driver the user is best placed to go to the manufacturer website and download it.

Back before Nvidia had automatic detection I'm pretty sure I installed the wrong driver and somehow caused some major issues with my PC. This was well over a decade ago.

Now I have some application of theirs sitting in my system tray and it makes life much easier.

This feature has sucked for a long time, and it’s past time that they got rid of it. It rarely works and, as the article notes, it offers a misleading message when no updates are found. Good riddance.

The only downside to this that's springing to mind, is when you plug in older hardware.

Sometimes manufacturers go out of business or no longer provide downloads for older models.

Or provide drivers only on a disc...

Windows 7-10 users may like SDI Tool Origin. It's libre software and it automatically fetches what you need.

What an awful clickbait title. Can this be changed? It's totally misleading and lacks the important information that this only applies to the Device Manager. Automatic Driver Search through WU, of course, hasn't been removed. That would be crazy.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com