Samsung Cripples Windows Update To Prevent Incompatible Drivers 289
jones_supa writes: A file called Disable_Windowsupdate.exe — probably malware, right? It's actually a "helper" utility from Samsung, for which their reasoning is: "When you enable Windows updates, it will install the Default Drivers for all the hardware no laptop which may or may not work. For example if there is USB 3.0 on laptop, the ports may not work with the installation of updates. So to prevent this, SW Update tool will prevent the Windows updates." Too bad that the solution means disabling all critical security updates as well. This isn't the first time an OEM has compromised the security of its users. From earlier this year, we remember the Superfish adware from Lenovo, and system security being compromised by the LG split screen software.
What? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:What? (Score:5, Interesting)
Does their warranty cover hacked laptop?
Re:What? (Score:4, Funny)
Re:What? (Score:5, Insightful)
Second semester law school: unconscionable contracts are unenforceable.
Aside from any contractual obligations between Samsung and Microsoft that would affect this, and you can bet there are some.
The lesson here, boys and girls, don't get legal advice from first semester law students. Consult a real lawyer.
Re: (Score:3)
My layperson's understanding is that the 'unconscionable' thing is practically impossible to get a positive ruling on, and has never been done for EULAs. If you are a 'real lawyer' then you can trump my lay understanding by citing a court case. Otherwise I think GP is right unfortunately.
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Re:What? (Score:4, Informative)
and has never been done for EULAs.
The terms for click through EULAs that you don't see until AFTER you've made your purchase and unpacked the goods are mostly ignored by the courts as well.
Re:What? (Score:5, Informative)
I am not, in fact, a lawyer, but I do know how to use Google (unlike so many here). For instance, I can, without any adult help, open up my web browser, and type in http://www.google.com/ [google.com] and go to a convenient search engine. In the search box for that search engine, I can type in "eula struck down as unconscionable" and click on the button labeled "Search." And get results such as
this [wordpress.com], which talks about Bragg v. Linden Research, Inc., in which Linden's TOS (specifically, the arbitration clause) is struck down as unconscionable not once, not twice, but at least three or four different times and ways ("procedural unconscionability" and "substantive unconscionability" in two different ways, and then again on the latter after Linden amended it).
Wired also covers Gatton v. T-Mobile, again on an arbitration clause, and ruled unconscionable both procedurally and substantively. Also unconscionable for prohibiting class action lawsuits, because "that form of litigation is often the only means of stopping and punishing corporate wrongdoing." It also discusses Douglas v. U.S. District Court, which is about changing the terms of a contact after it has been signed, and which was ruled unconscionable. Gatton is often cited as recognizing that all click-wrap license have an element of unconscionability that must be considered by the court.
This [leagueoflegends.com] has a link to this" [groklaw.net], which is a ruling on McKee v. AT&T, ruing their arbitration clause unconscionable.
Note that these are the first three results on the search, and the fourth is on McKee v. AT&T again.
Also note that these are all different courts, state and federal, all over the country.
Unconscionability is an affirmative defense - the defendant has to demonstrate why the contract is unconscionable, but it does, in fact, happen, and more importantly, it took me, literally, less than ten seconds to find example (and five of that was waiting for the browser to open.)
To quote the third link, you may now feed my cats for a week.
Re:What? (Score:4)
I use Internet Explorer, primarily so that I can say so on Slashdot and piss off the outrage monkeys.
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Who gives a shit about that. I wanted them to be sued for felony - hacking my laptop to prevent windows security updates. Potential RICO charges as well.
Technically it was still their laptop when the software was installed...How was it yours when it was still at the factory having the image slapped onto the hard drive?
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I've seen windows updates fuck a LOT of drivers over the years. Like picking up video drivers that either screw the display (video modes all fucked up) or even make the machine BSOD (so much for WHQL). Sometimes a driver rollback (in device manager) was enough, sometimes you had to boot with last known good config or safe mode to even get to the desktop. I could live with that much, but nowadays MS has pushed 12+ updates as "important" that are simply nagware to install that Win 10 abomination so I've final
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Windows Updates only installs drivers if "Recommended updates" is enabled. It will never try to update drivers if you are only receiving critical/important updates.
Samsung are a bunch of liars.
Re:What? (Score:5, Insightful)
"System Properties" -> "Hardware" -> "Device Installation Settings". There's not even any registry grovelling or other esoteric nonsense involved.
Things just get worse because, even if enabled, the Windows Update provided drivers will only be applied if no drivers are available locally(if drivers are available; but Windows Update has newer ones, they'll be listed as optional updates; but only installed with manual user intervention). So all Samsung has to do is add their drivers to the OS driver store (pnputil -a, not very hard) and the OS will apply them before even heading out to check for new ones, unless there is something egregiously wrong with them(if memory serves, unsigned drivers are treated as lower ranked than signed drivers when determining 'best driver available', and drivers that don't list the PCI/USB PID/VID, but have been forcibly applied, may also rank lower than drivers that do specify the matching PID/VID).
So, in summary and conclusion, this whole thing is an unbelievable clusterfuck and it isn't even clear why Samsung would think it necessary in order to ensure the drivers that they want installed get installed; much less how they could possibly think that the security consequences were worth it. Only its finite complexity saves this situation from fractal stupidity.
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Once the hardware is considered 'installed', future updates will show up in 'optional'. That's what's so weird: if Samsung's USB3 controller is utterly fucked up, or whatever the sorry misadventure may be, so long as they p
The problem is broken updates (Score:2, Informative)
Yeah, I'm rather sympathetic with Samsung here. The actual problem is with idiotic updates that break all the stuff you've finally got fixed from the last time an update broke it.
An update should fix the stuff that's broken, not break the stuff that's fixed.
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Terrible twos (Score:5, Insightful)
Samsung: You're terrible programmers!
Microsoft: No, you are terrible programmers!
Kids, kids, you'really both terrible.
Re:Terrible twos (Score:4, Insightful)
The problem:
Drivers to accommodate lack of open standards.
Back in the good old day,
CGA/EGA/VGA they followed their specs.
Serial and Parallel they followed a common spec.
Then Windows came popular with the support of drivers. This allowed hardware makers to stop playing by the rules thus creating a huge sets of incompatible SVGA (Visa more or less won) Then we went to 3D and all was lost. USB, different Wireless drivers.... Network cards...
For some reasons allowing this is good, because it allowed them to innovate and create new features. But on the other side, it threw out the idea of Open Hardware standards out the window.
Because the lack of such good standards, It creates systems that have driver issues.
Wow ... (Score:5, Insightful)
So, basically they have shit hardware or shit drivers, and the only way they can think of to fix this is to prevent your operating system from trying to apply updates?
This sounds like incompetence all the way around, and is on-going proof of why I hate OEM laptops. Because they fill them with so much garbage.
It seems like every time I hear anything about Samsung, I find myself thinking "nope, I would never buy their crap".
And, once again, corporations put their own crappy "innovation" ahead of the needs of their customers.
Pathetic.
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Re:Wow ... (Score:5, Funny)
> They still get the fewest complaints on NewEgg for much of their stuff for a reason
The reason being that nobody can keep one of them running long enough to file a complaint?
Prima facie evidence of bad hardware (Score:2)
And to think, their hardware is still better than most out there.
If there hardware requires weird non-standard drivers and disabling updates to work then it is by definition crap hardware. Maybe the hardware is fine and they are incompetent at software but that is not the most likely explanation. There would be no reason to disable Windows Update if the hardware worked as expected.
They still get the fewest complaints on NewEgg for much of their stuff for a reason.
Popularity and an alleged low number of complaints on NewEgg hardly constitutes proof of quality. If we are going by anecdotes the few pieces of Samsung hardware I've owned have been pretty
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This sounds like incompetence all the way around, and is on-going proof of why I hate OEM laptops. Because they fill them with so much garbage.
You mean OEM Windows laptops.
Re:Wow ... (Score:5, Insightful)
This one is completely on Samsung.
There is nothing stopping them from getting WHQL certification of their OEM drivers and submitting them to Microsoft. If their drivers are written properly (with proper hardware identification strings for PCI / USB / ACPI devices) then they will apply before generic drivers, and this isn't even a problem.
Funny how we don't hear about this from Acer / Dell / HP / Lenovo / etc...
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There is nothing stopping them from getting WHQL certification of their OEM drivers and submitting them to Microsoft. If their drivers are written properly (with proper hardware identification strings for PCI / USB / ACPI devices) then they will apply before generic drivers, and this isn't even a problem.
PCI is the only bus type you listed that includes OEM information embedded in the device identifier (using the subsystem VendorID). USB doesn't, and for the most part, neither does ACPI.
Additionally, OEMs don't typically certify device drivers through WHQL. It is usually the IHV that certifies the component/driver, and the OEM certifies the system consisting of components from different IHVs.
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the only thing stopping them from getting WHQL on their drivers is the fact that their crapware drivers wouldn't pass WHQL
There, FTFY.
Re:Wow ... (Score:5, Insightful)
Years ago at work, we got some new desktops.
The desktops had 4GB of RAM, but the Windows XP Pro on them could only see 3GB. One of the guys decided to put Windows 2003 on the machines to get access to all the RAM.
It turns out there were NO drivers for that hardware which existed for Windows 2003, and even getting back to XP Pro proved exceedingly difficult because ... it was almost impossible to find the drivers again as they basically weren't published anywhere. Essentially this machine could only work with the OEM image made up of drivers and other custom crap which were almost impossible to find.
To add insult to injury, whatever idiot had ordered them got us some new-fangled wide screen monitors. The problem was that while the actual resolution of the monitor was a 4:3 aspect ratio ... the actual pixels were flattened so that in its native resolution the screen drew circles as flattened ovals.
I 100% agree with you. Because non-standard crap from vendors makes for utter garbage machines.
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I... what?
I just sat and stared at my screen in utter shock after reading that. Can you say where you got that equipment from - who built it, sold it, etc?
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It was the dumbest monitor I ever saw.
I'm pretty sure it was a Dell product, it was a slightly non-standard resolution, and didn't have a single resolution it could do which matched the physical aspect ratio. All they did was make a monitor with rectangular pixels.
We couldn't understand the point behind it.
Near as I can figure, and some morons in marketing decided to "make teh widescreen for teh movies".
But it was useless for both graphics and videos, because graphics it couldn't draw a circle, and videos
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It basically felt like the company got swindled and bought some crappy desktops targeted to home users to pretend like they were all fancy, but were, in fact, utter crap.
Once you said "Dell", the above statement was utterly redundant.
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Years ago at work, we got some new desktops.
The desktops had 4GB of RAM, but the Windows XP Pro on them could only see 3GB. One of the guys decided to put Windows 2003 on the machines to get access to all the RAM.
It turns out there were NO drivers for that hardware which existed for Windows 2003, and even getting back to XP Pro proved exceedingly difficult because ... it was almost impossible to find the drivers again as they basically weren't published anywhere. Essentially this machine could only work with the OEM image made up of drivers and other custom crap which were almost impossible to find.
To add insult to injury, whatever idiot had ordered them got us some new-fangled wide screen monitors. The problem was that while the actual resolution of the monitor was a 4:3 aspect ratio ... the actual pixels were flattened so that in its native resolution the screen drew circles as flattened ovals.
I 100% agree with you. Because non-standard crap from vendors makes for utter garbage machines.
I get the feeling that maybe you have no idea what you are doing....
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Well, you screwed up. Windows 2003 is based on XP-64. You should've looked for XP-64 drivers and they would have installed just fine.
And it sounds like you didn't install the proper video adapter drivers or your display had a shitty EDID. Plenty of widescreen monitors support 4:3 resolutions and scale to fit the panel. Have since the early 90s, AFAIA.
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There's two problems with that:
1) There sure as hell is a 32-bit version of Windows 2003, and these were definitely 32-bit machines
2) The drivers simply did not exist. Dell had never made them for Windows 2003
Look, you may not believe it, but I don't give a fuck.
As delive
Re:Wow ... (Score:5, Interesting)
Windows 2003 had a 64 bit version, but Windows 2003 mainly was 32 bit. If you used the /PAE option on the 32 bit edition, you could get past the 4GB barrier on that OS... but the caceat was only if you had the enterprise or data center editions (which got you to 32 GB or 64 GB respectively.)
So, I do agree with the parent... the ability to get past 4GB did exist, but required a bunch of flaming hoops to go through.
As for monitors, I've seen lots of screwy, nonsensical stuff, stuff (such as a glitch on a SCSI card causing the monitor to tint green), so I wouldn't be surprised if this was the case.
Re: (Score:2)
You should've looked for XP-64 drivers and they would have installed just fine.
That's a funny one.
He could have found a magic unicorn to help install the drivers too. And perhaps the Easter Bunny could have delivered them, stored on isolinear optical chips too.
Come to think of it, the Easter Bunny has always been easier to find than XP-64 drivers, so perhaps he should have tried stuffing chocolate eggs into the disk drive.
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I had a laptop like that. It had drivers which were only in the OEM image, and the only way I still had the image was because I used ghost and copied the hard disk stuff somewhere safe.
I eventually was able to find the real OEM for the USB 2 drivers after looking by PCI ID, but the video card maker refused to give drivers, saying only the OEM had say in that, so I wound up using a third party's drivers that actually could make the video work. Of course, after the laptop's fan bearings went south and sound
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Heh 1280x1024. Those were the days. Pretty standard at one time though.
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I have an Asus laptop that the harddrive crapped out on. I had the displeasure of having to try to find the SATA drivers for the machine, since the generic IDE drivers were just hideous performance wise. The official download site did not have SATA drivers, or even chipset drivers (where storage drivers can often be found). In the end I did find some x64 Vista drivers from the weirdo Korean manufacturer (that was a fun website to navigate), though I still felt the performance wasn't what it had been, despit
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Some years ago, at my office, we had a laptop on which the hard drive failed, so I re-installed XP on it. I did not have an OEM image to work from.
I never did get sound working properly. The manufacturer had drivers on its website for that laptop model, but they were for different hardware. I tracked down drivers from the chipset manufacturer, and I could get sound partially working -- it worked through the built-in speakers, but not through the headphone jack, or the other way round.
The manufacturer: no su
Re: Wow ... (Score:2)
If the hardware doesn't work with default Windows or Linux distribution, it's shit. (think clean install).
Dude, we gave up interfacing everything through BIOS before the 80's were done. I recently installed an Intel NUC for the parental units with CentOS 7 and the WiFi didn't work until I had applied updates and installed the firmware package, and that's completely OK for new hardware. Hard-burned ROM's are extinct.
You're asking for a world without progress. Between that and Samsung's attitude here, it
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It's not about working through BIOS/burned in rom. It's about when manufacturers go to some cheap knock-off that closely enough matches some other component in the market close enough to get the wrong drivers.
Alternatively, when they use a configuration of some component in a way that requires special drivers (e.g. cramming a part into a thermal situation that's undersized for the component and having particular throttling scenarios to preserve capability and/or comfort).
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It's about when manufacturers go to some cheap knock-off that closely enough matches some other component in the market close enough to get the wrong drivers.
And this doesn't happen by accident. Every component self-identifies in some way during POST, or during Windows plug-and-play scan. Driver INF files list the ID strings to match against. Building a knock-off that identifies itself as the "real" product to avoid driver certification is an old trick, but at least it's understandable why someone would do it. Deliberately building a component that identifies as an existing product, but needs your own drivers? The mind boggles.
If true then Samsung is dead to me (Score:5, Insightful)
If true then I guess I won't be buying any Samsung computers anytime soon. A company that stupid simply isn't worth doing business with. Add this to the Samsung TVs that listen to your living room [cnet.com] and the bloatware on their Android devices and I pretty much can't see any reason to buy from Samsung these days.
Re:If true then Samsung is dead to me (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:If true then Samsung is dead to me (Score:5, Informative)
Ya, it did, at least the unencrypted part.
http://www.theguardian.com/tec... [theguardian.com]
Ya, it did, at least the recording private conversations part.
http://www.cnet.com/news/samsu... [cnet.com]
Hardware or driver's issues? (Score:2)
Re:Hardware or driver's issues? (Score:5, Interesting)
I can think of two solutions on how to solve this problem.
1) Pin the installed OEM drivers, so that Windows understands that no other drivers should be installed for these device IDs.
or
2) In the PCI device ID, add extra information that this device is a special Samsung variant, and then Windows knows that the generic driver for that device is not compatible.
I'm not sure if these solutions are possible, if someone knows more then please let me know.
Re: (Score:2)
You're missing the third option.
3. Tell Microsoft to quit forcing THEIR drivers on hardware. Trying to get IGPs to install is a pain in the ass. Default WDDM drivers for Vista/7 on an Intel 945GM IGP do not provide OpenGL support, and would not let me instal the actual Intel drivers w/OpenGL support citing "Microsoft's drivers are newer."
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I can think of two solutions on how to solve this problem.
1) Pin the installed OEM drivers, so that Windows understands that no other drivers should be installed for these device IDs.
or
2) In the PCI device ID, add extra information that this device is a special Samsung variant, and then Windows knows that the generic driver for that device is not compatible.
I'm not sure if these solutions are possible, if someone knows more then please let me know.
So IOW, do what Samsung should have done at the OEM level, right?
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Uhhhh (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Uhhhh (Score:5, Informative)
"Sign in to the dashboard with your Microsoft account,"
No, go fuck yourself. Give me control over my updates/drivers inside the OS and don't make me sign up for your fucking spam in order to have a WORKING operating system.
The linked page was for hardware developers to submit their drivers to Microsoft so that they can be included in updates.
But I'm sure you realized that...
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Not exactly like Superfish (Score:3)
This is not malicious. It is stupid and ignorant, but not malicious.
This reminds me of when someone got Verisign to issue a signed certificate saying "microsoft.com". Clearly Verisign, and not MS's, fault.
It turned out Microsoft could not issue a revocation, because Internet explorer does not check CRLs. MS's fault, right? Wrong. They were not testing CRLs because verisign would not bring up the web server that issues them, causing each and every SSL connection to time out. MS preferred, reasonably IMHO, to be insecure over not working.
Shachar
Re:Not exactly like Superfish (Score:5, Insightful)
This is not malicious. It is stupid and ignorant, but not malicious.
--Clark's corollary to Hanlon's Razor [rationalwiki.org] after Clarke's 3rd Law
Re: (Score:3)
This is not malicious. It is stupid and ignorant, but not malicious.
This is like selling a house without fuses in the electric circuits. Everything works, but is dangerous to use.
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You have to follow the money.
User doesn't update. User gets hacked. How much did user cost Samsung? Nothing.
Use updates. Drivers stop working. User calls Samsung tech-sup. Possibly, user gets told to restore machine, costing user all of their data. User posts bad reviews.
The economy of the matter is that sometimes the drivers mismatch (I'm not sure why this happens) or otherwise fail to work properly. Samsung has very little influence over what drivers get pushed through the update mechanism. When the drive
For large values of stupidity (Score:4, Insightful)
This is not malicious. It is stupid and ignorant, but not malicious.
Sufficiently large values of stupidity asymptotically approach maliciousness. In other words if the action is dumb enough there is no effective difference.
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It is exactly the same. Someone wants to do something stupid and doesn't realize it criples security.
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Wow! That's probably the lamest troll I've seen in ages.
Was I supposed to get mad over this? Man (woman?), you should really step up your act.
Shachar
cool (Score:3)
Disabling windows update - at least automatically - is a good idea.
It kept installing that reminder about Windows 10 coming soon.
I don't want Windows 10 - I hear it disables some critical software (Solitaire)
Automatic updates (Score:3)
Disabling windows update - at least automatically - is a good idea.
Maybe for a corporation with an IT staff. If you are like me and have to support small numbers of technologically illiterate people then automatic updates are a blessing. Otherwise those machines would literally never get updated. Ever.
Though honestly as the designated family techie the best thing (for my sanity) I ever did was move my parents to Apple products. Not so much because I think they are inherently better but they do result in less tech support problems (for me) and I got them support contrac
I've lost track of how many times I've been burned (Score:5, Informative)
I've lost track of how many times I've been burned by a driver update from Microsoft that turned out to be incompatible with my hardware, likely because Windows Update misidentified my hardware as compatible with the driver. I no longer install any drivers through Windows Update, but instead go to the vendors sites and get them straight from the source.
Fortunately, the drivers are always optional updates, so you can just flag them as hidden and ignore them.
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Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Fine, as long as they assume the risk (Score:3, Interesting)
It would've been far simpler and less controversial for Samsung to just turn off the Windows 8/10 equivalent of Windows 7's "[right click on your computer's icon]->Device Installation settings->Do you want Windows to download driver software and realistic icons for your devices" option in the "Devices and Drivers" control panel and provide their own "driver update" program. I don't have a Samsung, for all I know, they may already have a "driver update" program. I know at least 2 major Windows-PC vendors do have their own "update" programs that include alerting users when their drivers are out of date, and it wouldn't surprise me if Samsung was doing the same.
Given what Samsung is doing, if Samsung provides its own "Samsung Update" that (by default) automatically takes all critical Microsoft Updates and which at least gives the user the option of taking vetted non-critical updates (or even better all Windows updates EXCEPT conflicting driver updates) AND keeps this running as long as Microsoft continues to allow access to its "Windows Update" functionality (which is presumably longer than the "10 years" it promises to keep fixing security holes) then I can see this being "not all that dangerous." However, if they do this they need to make it VERY clear to the buyer that Samsung, not Microsoft, is taking responsibility for keeping the operating system up to date.
My Samsung Laptop (Score:5, Interesting)
I bought a Samsung laptop. i5, 6gb ram, Hybrid NVIDIA and Intel graphics, 750gb HDD, DVD burner. It is light, well powered and cost efficient back in 2011. Windows 7-64 bit. Problem is: Even the keyboard hotkeys such as screen brightness, WiFi, etc. work only through a "Control panel" that takes ages to load. Volume keys don't work within a game and sometimes the trackpad stops working after sleeping. And also I don't dare installing Linux on it because I read about severe cases of linux bricking the UEFI and rendering the laptop completerly useless.
Alas, after you start it up (either from off or sleeping) and wait the 10-15 minutes for the HDD to calm down (after stripping down the startup, defragmenting, ccleaner and the such) it runs really well.
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I've been thinking about installing a small SDD and putting the big, slow one into a CD-bay caddy. But the problem comes from Samsung making it non standard.
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I mean, making the controls non standard so that it has to load a huge program whenever I press the brightness keys.
HDD cadies for CD bay are available.
and I thought Linux had driver issues (Score:5, Informative)
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And most* Linux updaters allow the locking of individual components. So if my hardware requires some non standard tweaked up driver, I can fix it so that it won't pull down a 'standard' driver and bork my system.
*As far as I know. I've not encountered one that didn't support this level of granularity.
On the other hand... (Score:2)
Years ago I learned never to trust MS with hardware updates. Don't know how many times a graphic card or lan update from them pretty much disabled the graphics card or lan.
If only... (Score:4, Insightful)
I could have sworn MS had some way for OEMs to get drivers certified, and provided by Windows Update directly...
Tha's a tough one there... (Score:5, Insightful)
Surely there must be a way to have avoided this.
Maybe Microsoft should set up some kind of... Lab. To certify the Quality of Hardware for Windows. And maybe they could make it really simple for vendors like Samsung to send them copies of drivers for certification so that Windows Update would be aware that they existed.
And maybe, instead of demanding millions of dollars in fees for this service, they could charge something simple up front like just $250 and then not cause any more problems. Then Samsung would have been able to run through a quick certification process and avoided all of this trouble.
Man, why does Microsoft make it so hard for vendors to get their devices supported?
Samsung goes Viral ! (Score:2)
Boy, this takes the cake.
Well in some cases it is a problem. (Score:3)
I had to disable some drivers from updating to keep my computer running. The drivers installed automatically were not only older, they didn't work for my configuration. For most end users an automatically installed update making their computer non-bootable is a huge problem.
That said there have to be a better way to do this, what about a mechanism where an OEM can declare some drivers untouchable for Windows update? Or even making the hardware manufacturers/device driver writers use the existing hardware detecting mechanisms correctly?
Comment removed (Score:3)
Not just dangerous, but completely unnecessary. (Score:3)
Driver updates offered via Windows Update are always listed as "optional". Even with automatic updates enabled they would have to be chosen manually before they would be installed. On top of that, it would be easy to uninstall such an update via "Progams and Features" in Control Panel, or to click on "Roll Back Driver" in Device Manager.
Disabling updates to prevent bad driver installations is both misguided and unnecessary.
The real problem is incompatible hardware (Score:3)
The real problem is that the systems contain hardware that isn't compatible with the standard Windows drivers yet is still showing up in a way that Windows will think it is and will pull drivers via Windows Update.
USB (even USB 3.0) is a documented standard that is supported out-of-the-box by Windows (and is likely part of the Intel chip-set they are using in the laptop), why would it need special drivers?
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Well, I could tell you, but I don't think you'll like the answer... *hands over robes, a candle, and a copy of "Jobs"*
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Clevo comes to mind. They are a Taiwan based company, and have produced some very good hardware in the past.
They have a wide range of products to choose from. If you want a Xeon based laptop with three hard disks in a RAID 0/1/5 configuration, they have a model for that, although the battery with something like that is more of a UPS function (lasts ~30 minutes) than something you would use without having it plugged in. If you want an ultralight model, they also have those, and a lot in between.
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I agree, the HP machine I had years back was decent. Their tech support, on the other hand, is hilariously incompetent to the point of negligence, by which I mean, something broke under warranty, I called them, they insisted not only that I didn't have a warranty, but that the machine (which I purchased directly from them not a year earlier) didn't exist and never had. Took hours on calls (mostly on hold) to get them to admit otherwise. Never buying an HP consumer machine ever again. (And the machine wasn't
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Enabling automatic updates is a greater security threat than not updating your OS at all.
The risk of data loss due to sudden unwanted restarts is far greater and more real than having an OS that is 2 days out of date
Strictly speaking risk of data loss due ti restarts is not itself a security threat.
Re:well done. (Score:5, Insightful)
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That would be when you click the "No, not now! I'm in the middle of giving a presentation to the board!" button, and then it responds with "Well, FINE. I'm tired of waiting and next time I WON'T ASK YOU."
Or when you don't respond quickly enough and it takes your lack of response as consent.
And then it decides to reboot on its own.
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Or a slight variation :
you want to boot your laptop for a presentation in front of a few hundred people.
It's 8:50 in the morning, your presentation is at 9:00.
You get a nice blue screen that tells you "Please wait till 30 updates are installed". Then you get "Please wait till 200000 files are updated".
It often takes more than 30 minutes to do so.
Re:well done. (Score:5, Informative)
I'm trying to calculate just how much cheap moonshine you have to drink until a prompt where the computer asks if you want to reboot now, or not counts as "the OS decided to reboot all on its own".
Microsoft update WILL reboot on its own. It'll pester you for a few days then it literally reboots your computer without giving you a choice.
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If really worried, do your work in a VM and have something like AutoProtect in VMWare Workstation save a snapshot every few hours. If you go home, find the VM rebooted, it isn't tough to go back to a point in time before the reboot, save one's work then reboot.
If the host machine reboots, it will just suspend the VM before the reboot, so unless one is running an item in real time, the RPO is 0 and RTO is just getting the VM turned back on.
Another option is using WSUS. I have it configured to auto-approve
Re:Unfortunately, they're right (Score:5, Insightful)
If I allow Windows Update to "update" the driver for my Bluetooth stick, it doesn't work any longer.
I've seen that problem before on a Bluetooth stick. The real issue was that I had purchased some Chinese ripoff clone of another product (I didn't know at the time that's what I was doing. We learn.); and the original company had released updated drivers to Microsoft. These new drivers worked just fine with the oem product, but something in the ripoff product didn't work with the new drivers, and the stick stopped working. I had to back the drivers out, re-install the original drivers and mark that particular update as "do not install".
I've no idea if the original company (who had their gear ripped off) spiked the driver deliberately or simple broke it by accident.
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Well there's certainly a prominent example of a company taking explicit aim to *break* knock-off devices in a driver update:
http://arstechnica.com/informa... [arstechnica.com]
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It happened to me with genuine products. Logitech keyboard/mouse that had a bluetooth receiver. Windows 7 decided it should have a new shiny bluetooth 3 driver installed for it which didn't work, which lost you access to the keyboard and mouse. Downgrade and pin, as you say, or disable the bluetooth entirely and have it act just as a keyboard/mouse.
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Can someone please tell me what this means? I cannot parse this phrase.
Probably a typo, and should read "all the hardware on my laptop"?
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You're not alone, I have no idea what it's supposed to mean either.
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The other half of the problem is Windows with its crappy drivers, bloatware and backwards compatible garbage.
Re:This is why Microsoft (Score:5, Informative)
Look at the Vista fiasco. OEMs had to be dragged, kicking and screaming, to the privilege model (which has been in the UNIX world for decades, and was in the Mac world for at least five years) where they don't have all their stuff run with admin rights. Then, when MS added some fundamental security features like ASLR, forcing drivers to be rewritten, OEMs shipped alpha-quality code, then blamed the crashes on MS.