Bad Windows 10 driver in 10586.122 poses serious questions about forced patching and Windows as a Service

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How is Microsoft going to fix the problem with the new, bad driver? InfoWorld Woody on Windows
[See the full post at: Bad Windows 10 driver in 10586.122 poses serious questions about forced patching and Windows as a Service]

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Not only was this kind of problem eminently foreseeable, it’s amazing it’s taken this long to arise. It’s supremely ironic – and poetic justice, many would say – that the issue should arise in respect of compatibility isues with another MS product!

Thanks for the info Woody, I’m sure you’ll keep us updated!

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Well, as @Seff said, it is a problem that was easily foreseeable…that said, an Xbox controller situation is one thing and that’s bad enough affecting millions of users. But when this type of ” bad forced patch” event hits business and personal machines, which it will at some point, there will be an earthquake. Bricking Xcel, or Word, or bringing down the OS with a forced patch that keeps re-installing…well, maybe that’s when MS will wake up to what they are doing.

I can’t even imagine that “the best and the brightest” who work at MS can’t see the inevitable coming down the road for their W10 customers. No one, no company, can be perfect, yet they are running their business as if they will be…

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MS would not have to reissue the entire Cumulative Update in order to change the driver patch. Since drivers have version numbers of their own, all that MS Updates needs to do, is offer a single-issue driver patch with an updated driver version number.

When I first upgraded to Windows 10 on my laptop, this is exactly what I found. There was a NVidia driver and its evil twin from earlier in the year. The latter was a bad patch and the former was its replacement, with possibly some security updates included. Point is, MS Updates in Windows 10 is perfectly capable of issuing an out of band corrective patch for a single driver issue. If this were something other than a driver, then the question of how to correct the CU might have legitimately been raised.

As for publicity, Woody, you and many others in the tech press would be all over this corrective patch, as this is a nearly unprecedented situation for forced updates in Windows 10. This story, however it is eventually resolved, is headline worthy.

As for the tinfoil hat crowd who don’t trust anything MS throws down the updates chute, it would take some time (a couple of weeks) for us to be totally convinced that this isn’t just another MS tactic to take control of out updating options. But time would make converts of most of us.

It would only be if MS does nothing about the bad driver patch, that folks who care about such matters would continue to lose faith in the relationship between MS and their forced-updates customers. For many of us, that would be the final piece of proof that MS cannot be trusted to look after the stability and safety of their customers’ PCs and devices.

FWIW, we can look at what has been going on with some Linux graphics drivers for another perspective.

Ubuntu has never gotten along well with my hybrid Intel-NVidia graphics in my 1st-gen core-i5 laptop. So last weekend I upgraded my Intel graphics driver using a supposedly Intel provided upgrade utility. Before the process was over, the entire graphics environment had been severely munged, and neither the Intel driver nor the NVidia driver would work at all. Ever try to fix a GUI without any screen to look at? Fortunately, Linux does have a Terminal, and that was not blacked out. Unfortunately, I was unsuccessful in debugging the munged GUI.

So, relying on a bootable rescue CD of Clonezilla Live Wily, I trotted out my backup hard drive and rolled back to a stable configuration. (Of course, I do data backups per-session to another partition on my internal hard drive, so no work was lost. Just a few days of usage logs.)

The recovered installation had a few rollback bugs to iron out, mostly in GUI system files which were overwritten with munged versions from my latest data backup. (In Linux by default, many system data files are comingled with user data in the same Home Folder. Technically, these are settings and user data files, but they affect the stability of the GUI system. Bad design, and correctable, but this is the Ubuntu default setup.)

So, Windows 10 users could have things worse.

Note to Self — NEVER rely on third-party driver updaters — not even from Intel!

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If MS releases a standalone driver fix, that’s great! I’d like to see them do it, and hope that (if they do) they document it well.

As you recall, the NVidia driver problem persisted for days and days. The only solution was to manually install a different driver – just as you did. Correct me if I’m wrong, but I don’t recall Microsoft sending out a new version of the driver as a standalone download. I only recall the problem getting fixed in the next CU. Or, actually, several CUs later.

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Amen! A strategy, that to prove successful, requires that you execute in a manner for which you are likely incapable is not a good strategy. If MS is going to have a chance to make Win 10 work as presently envisioned, I think the Win 10 ecosystem will need to migrate to a closed hardware/software environment where end-to-end control minimizes the risk of catastrophic errors. I don’t think MS can pull it off.

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It was months later, and the new NVidia driver was issued due to a new security issue. I was upgrading after the whole flap had blown over. You are correct that in the interim, the only solution was to download the NVidia driver from the NVidia site, or else too do brain salad surgery on the Updatus User (phantom) Account.

But when it came (a couple of CUs later, both NVidia patches showed up in automatic updates as separate, non-CU standalone patches. Through normal automatic updates, we still had to take it all or leave it all; the bad NVidia driver simply would bounce back a Failed to Install message, and we could leave well enough alone at that point — but only if we had updated the NVidia driver from NVidia’s site before applying the then-current CU and NVidia driver patches. The bad driver does not overwrite the good driver.

Yes, this was far from ideal, but the Windows Updates Catalog may show each NVidia driver patch as a separate download, not requiring installing anything else to get the patches from that source. Which does nothing to help average consumer-level users, who don’t know how to use the Updates Catalog, much less how to avoid getting the bad NVidia driver through automatic updates in the first place.

For the XBox driver, I am sure Microsoft could issue a stand-alone patch to replace the bad driver. But they probably will wait one or two updates cycles to issue that patch, which will appear alongside the next CU or major Feature Updates patches. Probably with a Flash layer stand alone patch thrown in for good measure, and the ubiquitous Malicious Software Removal Tool (MRT) patch.

Again, sophisticate users could at that time, download the stand alone installer for the XBox driver from the Updates Catalog and install it by itself, as could be done with either version of the NVidia driver patch. Or for that matter, MRT or any Flash Player patch once they are posted in the Updates Catalog. Which still does happen, eventually.

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Thanks!

My next challenge is to run wushowhide between the time the next CU is announced, and the time my Win10 installations install it. Not sure if I can squeak in between those two events, not sure precisely when Win10 will check for the new CU, and not sure if I’ll be able to stop the CU if I’m in time.

Should be an interesting experiment!

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This isn’t about the next CU for Win 10 Pro.

I got a nasty surprise at a computer club meeting last night. I couldn’t get online using Wireless LAN on my ASUS Transformer Book t100tam tablet.

Long story short, there was a CU (the last one in feb. 2016) which had looked like everything had gone well last week when I applied it. But on March 3rd, the CU showed up in my Updates History as Failed to Install. Today, Mar. 4th, I caught up with this situation and let the CU install without going online at all. It went through, and then I ran virus scans and cleaned up the tablet. All is well now, and network connections is back under control.

I’ll check my Toshiba Satellite laptop, also Win 10 Pro, over the weekend for the same issue, if present.

The strange thing is, between last week (when the CU failed) and yesterday (when the network issue occurred), I had no indication, and no notifications, that anything was wrong with the tablet.

I hope this sort of behavior doesn’t become a habit with these Cumulative updates!

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Very strange. I’ve never heard of that before….

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Apparently MS laid off a lot of testing engineers in 2014 and now developers have to test their own code. Some have argued that home users, with a free OS, are now beta testers for enterprise. Perhaps that is why there has to be so much telemetry, and why MS is pushing Win 10 on home users so aggressively. It all sort of makes sense I guess.

Linux Mint recently had their website hacked and their forum compromised, but all seems to be repaired and at a much higher level of security than before. So far, I am happy that I have switched most of my work to Linux Mint and Libre Office.

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Assuming you have Pro, set your policy (gpedit.msc) as follows, then you need not worry about when the system will decide to do the update. You’ll be in control. It will only update when you click through the Updates button in the Settings panel.

Computer Configuration > Windows Components > Windows Update : Configure Automatic Updates

Set it to “Disabled”.

-Noel

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Instead of swimming in a Safe Pool/Internet you might as well be swimming Amongst’s sharks..

Woody) Every time there’s a Big Hype of a New Build M.S. Tells people it’s going to more n more Better than what we’ve ever Done, you’ll like allot but, it seems to be actually Less not being to much better than the Last..

Unless I’m missing something.. But so far my computer is running ok Actually when It’s setting Idle it’s only using 1 to 2 percent on Win,8.1 there would be times it would shoot up the using 25 ta 30%

One thing I took off was Wild Tangent Games but I would like a Good suggestion of a Solitaire Game if you have one I like the old one in Window XP

Thanks for Reading this, Hope your Enjoying the Weekend.. Ron

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Solitaire Collection is nice, but it has 30-second ads all the time.

You can bring back the Win7 games, but it’s not easy. Details here:

http://www.howtogeek.com/225128/you-dont-have-to-pay-20-a-year-for-solitaire-and-minesweeper-on-windows-10/

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@Noel Carboni —

This was not a new download. The update was applied Feb. 14th and did not report failing to install. I only noticed the failure when doing a post-mortem on the network connection issue March 4th. That was when I reinstalled the CU,plus a newer Platform Stability Update. Now all is well, and on Metered Connections wherever I go for the next three to four weeks.

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You should read the whole story of Linux Mint, and also of Elementary OS, The Solus Project, and the Budgie Desktop. The whole bunch of these “hobbyist” or “niche” forks of Ubuntu Linux is a sad and sordid tale of woeful neglect and developer narrow mindedness.
Read:
http://www.techrepublic.com/article/why-the-linux-mint-hack-is-an-indicator-of-a-larger-problem/

Then decide if you want this level of security, or if you would prefer something better maintained.

What you need to know:
https://www.linux.com/community/blogs/133-general-linux/887351-lessons-from-the-linux-mint-hack

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Thank ya Sir..

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