8 ms·

Re-posting my comment from the other thread which didn't get as much attention: I spent about 3 hours this week doing tech support for my mom over the phone be

Re-posting my comment from the other thread which didn't get as much attention: I spent about 3 hours this week doing tech support for my mom over the phone because of Windows 10's aggressive upgrading behaviour. I told her to keep her the best way to keep safe security wise is to make sure the os/browser is up to date, and because Windows 10 keeps asking to upgrade, she went ahead and did so. After upgrading to Windows 10, all network access (wired and wifi) stopped working completely. The worst part of this is that if you can't get internet, you can't even download new drivers to try and debug the problem. We tried a few things, and eventually just did a system restore back to Windows 8, but unfortunately, the system restore didn't work completely and there was more mucking around to try and get the computer into a bootable state. Then, last night, she said the heard the fan making a lot of noise, and looked down to see that Windows had gone ahead and started installing Windows 10 again. Fortunately, wired network access works now, but wifi is still broken. Hopefully Windows will push an update that fixes the wifi access soon. Also, there seems to be a number of people here commenting very strongly in favour of Microsoft, which I find very surprising. Perhaps people from MS trying to do damage control? Some people have doubted that Windows is doing this automatically, but during the above debacle, my mother actually spent time to make sure that 'Check for updates but let me choose whether to download and install them' was selected. She even sent me a screenshot asking if this would prevent Windows 10 from installing. A few hours later she had Windows 10 again.

robertelder 11y ago
On that topic, she just said that she has spent that past 2 days trying to get wifi to work. Does anyone here have suggestions for fixing/debugging this? I haven't used windows in quite a while, so my approach is just to go into device manager and try to click on 'update driver', find and diagnose problems etc. Tried deleting and re-creating the wifi connection, re-entering the password. The wifi connection appears, and we can 'connect' to it, but it says 'no internet access' but wifi can't access 192.168.0.1 (the router). The wired connection works fine. I don't know much about Windows sub-systems. I'm pretty sure all the Windows 10 updates have downloaded and installed.
- bbradley406 11y ago
  Given that it appears to partially work, I would guess that the auto-updated driver doesn't work properly on Windows 10. Can you determine the model / chipset of the wireless card?
  - robertelder 11y ago
    Dell Wireless 1703 802.11b/g/n is as much detail as I've been able to get. She's trying to download some drivers from the Dell site at the moment (I'm very fortunate that she is computer literate enough to do this much).
- vibrolax 11y ago
  My fiancee (at her daughter's recommendation) allowed the Windows 10 upgrade to proceed on her Lenovo T530. It suffered the same Wifi symptoms you reported. We followed the same course of action to repair the problem, to no avail. Reverted to Windows 7 using the Windows 10 downgrade procedure, but the Wifi still failed to work properly. We successfully restored Windows 7 from a recent image backup. I've had no problems performing Windows 10 clean installs on several machines, but have been far too skeptical to believe Microsoft could pull off a mass upgrade of the Windows 7/8 installed base. I wonder what upgrade failure rate they deemed acceptable during their deployment testing?
- ajonit 11y ago
  I faced an issue on my new Asus laptop Atheros wifi adapter. Changing the channel from 11 to Auto on my roouter did the trick and things are fine since then.
HelloMcFly 11y ago
> Perhaps people from MS trying to do damage control? While I appreciate the rest of your comment, I personally find comment like these are obnoxious. I sincerely doubt that vote and comment brigading are anywhere near as prevalent as reddit and this community seem to so routinely imply. Perhaps I'm the naive one, but it is tiresome to so regularly see comments (especially those close to one's own personal beliefs) consistently labeled indicators of a social media PR campaign because someone just can't believe they might be genuine. Or maybe I should get my head out of the sand, I do not know.
- mung 11y ago
  Anyone who believes that it's okay to force unwanted updates onto someone's computer without unexpectedly and without their consent is a bit obnoxious.
  - HelloMcFly 11y ago
    I don't think it's OK. Is that what you wanted?
- mrmondo 11y ago
  I'm not going to go into detail right now, but believe me it happens from Microsoft more than any other company I've seen.
  - cududa 11y ago
    That's just it though - I don't believe you.
- carapace 11y ago
  For what it's worth I believe you are being wildly naive. Have a nice day.
  - HelloMcFly 11y ago
    It isn't worth much, but - believe it or not - it's not totally worthless either. Note my wording though: I believe it does happen at times, I doubt it happens with the frequency claimed on HN and reddit. Hearing more first-hand accounts of it occurring is required for me to move substantially on my opinion. As is, it's primarily speculation and people asking others to "trust them, it happens." That said, I could do without the insincere well wishes.
marklawrutgers 11y ago
I had this exact same issue with my work machine and my at home workstation. Wifi adapter completely broken, I tried to revert back to Windows 8 on my work machine and it gets stuck on a black screen for over 24 hours. I tried to power down to restart it but no luck. Somehow everything got corrupted. Had to completely reformat the drive and install the operating system all over again, which it then proceeded to upgrade straight to Windows 10 again. I lost months of work but was able to recover from a backup I had a week prior to the incident. Absolutely disgusting business practice by Microsoft. The only times where a Windows 10 installation has worked well for me is when it's a brand new machine with little to no extra content on top of the existing OS. If you've used Windows 7 or 8 for over a year and accumulated a fair amount of apps, files, content, I can almost guarantee you're going to run into something breaking after the update.
- chrsstrm 11y ago
  Same scenario three weeks ago trying to help out my brother on his brand new Asus that came with Win 10. The wireless hardware just disappeared from the control panel so the option to update the driver wasn't available. I was about to walk him through a complete OS re-install with the option to keep his files until he decided that a wired connection was OK. At the time there was almost no available recent support articles on this issue, but I'm starting to think a Win update caused this after seeing others with the same problem. And here he was going to blame it on his kids...
  - Terr_ 11y ago
    > The wireless hardware just disappeared from the control panel I installed a fresh Win10 for a family member, and the complete mess of absent/hidden/redesigned/half-duplicated control panel stuff was my first hint that I'd want to stay on Windows-7.
    - deleted 11y ago
      [deleted]
- krsree 11y ago
capabit 11y ago
> Also, there seems to be a number of people here commenting very strongly in favour of Microsoft Count me (shockingly) in the pro Microsoft group here. After years and years of supporting family PCs, I understand and appreciate what they're trying to do. If you make updating something the user has to do, they'll never do it. If you prompt them to update, they'll never do it. Even if they've had the why of it explained to them many, many times. In anticipation of the inevitable "well this update famously broke X": yes, the risk of an update doing something funky outweighs the risk of running software with known and possibly currently exploited vulnerabilities.
- Esau 11y ago
  So safety is more important than freedom? The attorney general and the FBI must really love you.
- enraged_camel 11y ago
  We don't force people to vaccinate their kids, even though unvaccinated kids are a risk to herd immunity. What makes you think it's OK to force users to update their computers?
  - adiabatty 11y ago
    Actually, we do. We here in California have pockets of parents who refuse to vaccinate their kids — to the point where a school full of them starts to lose herd immunity. Within the past twelve months, our governor signed a law significantly tightening the requirements to get an exemption; http://www.mercurynews.com/ci_28407108/gov-jerry-brown-signs-californias-new-vaccine-bill http://www.mercurynews.com/ci_28407108/gov-jerry-brown-signs... says that only medical exemptions will get you out of vaccinating your kids here in California.
- makecheck 11y ago
  Even if Microsoft was just tired of having to ask the user for every little thing, there is a gulf between “ask the user if he or she wants to update” and “auto-install multi-gigabyte blob that changes everything, over a data plan that we don’t pay for, affecting users in dozens of ways that we cannot possibly know in advance” (as Microsoft has now chosen to do). Microsoft could have started really small with this, even updating a single app. There is no non-marketing reason to simultaneously change massive amounts of software. And since it is now clear that parts of Windows 10 really are half-baked (like duplicate settings panels), there are clearly some things that should have waited for a later update, once there was time to finish them. And you know, Microsoft has made billions and billions from software so frankly they do not get to screw around here. Nobody with that much money and that many engineers should get an ounce of sympathy for being so incompetent. They needed to start by doing a lot less, with a lot more care and attention.
marvy 11y ago
This is madness. I've actually had the "opposite" problem. Ever since Win10 came out, my Win7 machine doesn't bother announcing when updates are available. I have to remember to install them myself ever "patch Tuesday". But I repeat: this is madness. What kind of a psycho update mechanism would try to install an new OS behind your back?
- edwhitesell 11y ago
  > I've actually had the "opposite" problem. Ever since Win10 came out, my Win7 machine doesn't bother announcing when updates are available. I have to remember to install them myself ever "patch Tuesday". I also had this issue until I sat down and figured out how to make Windows Update stop forcing Windows 10 on me. Basically, you need to remove KB3035583, hide it from updates AND uncheck the box to "give me recommended updates the same way I receive important updates". Otherwise, it would keep coming back. This latest patch Tuesday also introduced another "update" to trigger Win10 installation, it's called: upgrade to Windows 10 Pro, version 1511, 10586 Hiding that in Windows Update got me back to installing the normal updates. Microsoft is making this whole process way too painful for those of us who know we don't want to update.
  - deciplex 11y ago
    That will work until they make KB3035583 "Important" again. Basically, the way they're going, it's only a matter of time before Win 7 & 8 basically don't work anymore.
    - kefka 11y ago
      Eh. I just turn updates off. It solves the issue sufficiently.
      - deciplex 11y ago
        Yes. Pretty much this. You do need some updates though, and Microsoft hardly does a good job of describing what each update does from WU itself, so hope you like looking up each individual update on the MS website. Eventually they'll just start obfuscating what an update does on the website as well, if not lying outright.
vacri 11y ago
> The worst part of this is that if you can't get internet, you can't even download new drivers to try and debug the problem. I have a friend who made a slipstream installer of XP that was the barebones base installer... plus 696 network drivers. I think it was 696, may have been 676. He'd found a package of "every XP network driver ever". Anyway, "This iso will install XP that can get you connected to download everything else..." made for a very useful bit of kit.
ebbv 11y ago
> Also, there seems to be a number of people here commenting very strongly in favour of Microsoft, which I find very surprising. Perhaps people from MS trying to do damage control? Sometime in the last couple years Microsoft has realized how important online discussion is to a company's reputation and has begun an aggressive campaign of let's call it "community outreach". Unfortunately though it appears to me to be astro turfing, the admins here and elsewhere seem to believe it to be legitimate, so whatever techniques they're using are sophisticated.
jdietrich 11y ago
>Also, there seems to be a number of people here commenting very strongly in favour of Microsoft, which I find very surprising. I think it's an issue of trust. On the one hand, Microsoft have taken some positive steps - making meaningful OSS contributions, following standards in Edge, making sensible statements about crypto etc. On the other hand, Microsoft have an atrocious track record of corporate citizenship, typified by the Halloween memos. While they have been making progress, they are still a long way from perfect. Even if their current actions were beyond reproach, rebuilding trust takes time. I think some people on HN want to give Microsoft the benefit of the doubt, while others think it's just the same old bullshit under a new coat of paint. Personally, I think we should take each issue on merit. Praise where praise is due and criticise where criticism is due.
zanny 11y ago
Just anecdotally : I have my grandmother, brother, and his mother on Kubuntu, and my mother on Lubuntu. So far, the most updates anyone has gone through is 3 (my mother went from 10.04 to 12.04 to 14.04 and soon 16.04) and we have never had an issue. Oh, and you get to chose when to do the upgrades rather than having them backdoored on you. Desktop Linux works fine for regular people. They aren't going to go digging in the terminal to brick their own computer. Show them the software center and that their app store uses things online called apt links and anyone with a smartphone understands it fine.
- Cub3 11y ago
  Set my girlfriend up with a Chromebook for this very reason. An "open and go" computer that fits her needs (and reduces the tech support calls to me)
CoffeeDregs 11y ago
Drive-by-upgrade... Happened to my wife's Windows 8 computer late last week with no warning. She was puzzled to wake up to a computer that had been upgraded without asking her. Then she couldn't use our home printer. So she went to work to print something. But then she couldn't use the work WiFi. I know that her Windows 10 experience will be better than her terrible Windows 8 experience, but this seems clearly to be a maneuver to minimize the Software Support Reserve line on the Income Statement. I'm all for upgrading users from a crappy Windows 8 to a nice Windows 10. That said, my wife is a reasonably sophisticated user and she didn't notice any significant notification before her computer was upgraded. [... And, when I talked with her about the upgrade, she mentioned that she was now getting toolbar pop-ups asking her "How likely are you to recommend Windows to a friend?" WTF.]
dang 11y ago
> people here commenting very strongly in favour of Microsoft, which I find very surprising. Perhaps people from MS trying to do damage control I realize you didn't mean to, but this triggered a whole off-topic discussion about imaginary astroturfing, vote-brigading, and shilling. When we see evidence of these behaviors we crack down on them hard. But people are far too ready (by at least an order of magnitude, probably two) to impute this behavior to others merely because they have an opposing opinion. That's not evidence, and the discussion should never go there on that (non-)basis. All: if you suspect astroturfing in HN threads, please let us know at hn@ycombinator.com so we can investigate, and please don't go on about it in the threads unless there's real evidence. An opposing opinion is not evidence!

robertelder 11y ago

On that topic, she just said that she has spent that past 2 days trying to get wifi to work. Does anyone here have suggestions for fixing/debugging this? I haven't used windows in quite a while, so my approach is just to go into device manager and try to click on 'update driver', find and diagnose problems etc. Tried deleting and re-creating the wifi connection, re-entering the password. The wifi connection appears, and we can 'connect' to it, but it says 'no internet access' but wifi can't access 192.168.0.1 (the router). The wired connection works fine. I don't know much about Windows sub-systems. I'm pretty sure all the Windows 10 updates have downloaded and installed.

bbradley406 11y ago
Given that it appears to partially work, I would guess that the auto-updated driver doesn't work properly on Windows 10. Can you determine the model / chipset of the wireless card?
- robertelder 11y ago
  Dell Wireless 1703 802.11b/g/n is as much detail as I've been able to get. She's trying to download some drivers from the Dell site at the moment (I'm very fortunate that she is computer literate enough to do this much).
vibrolax 11y ago
My fiancee (at her daughter's recommendation) allowed the Windows 10 upgrade to proceed on her Lenovo T530. It suffered the same Wifi symptoms you reported. We followed the same course of action to repair the problem, to no avail. Reverted to Windows 7 using the Windows 10 downgrade procedure, but the Wifi still failed to work properly. We successfully restored Windows 7 from a recent image backup. I've had no problems performing Windows 10 clean installs on several machines, but have been far too skeptical to believe Microsoft could pull off a mass upgrade of the Windows 7/8 installed base. I wonder what upgrade failure rate they deemed acceptable during their deployment testing?
ajonit 11y ago
I faced an issue on my new Asus laptop Atheros wifi adapter. Changing the channel from 11 to Auto on my roouter did the trick and things are fine since then.

HelloMcFly 11y ago

> Perhaps people from MS trying to do damage control? While I appreciate the rest of your comment, I personally find comment like these are obnoxious. I sincerely doubt that vote and comment brigading are anywhere near as prevalent as reddit and this community seem to so routinely imply. Perhaps I'm the naive one, but it is tiresome to so regularly see comments (especially those close to one's own personal beliefs) consistently labeled indicators of a social media PR campaign because someone just can't believe they might be genuine. Or maybe I should get my head out of the sand, I do not know.

mung 11y ago
Anyone who believes that it's okay to force unwanted updates onto someone's computer without unexpectedly and without their consent is a bit obnoxious.
- HelloMcFly 11y ago
  I don't think it's OK. Is that what you wanted?
mrmondo 11y ago
I'm not going to go into detail right now, but believe me it happens from Microsoft more than any other company I've seen.
- cududa 11y ago
  That's just it though - I don't believe you.
carapace 11y ago
For what it's worth I believe you are being wildly naive. Have a nice day.
- HelloMcFly 11y ago
  It isn't worth much, but - believe it or not - it's not totally worthless either. Note my wording though: I believe it does happen at times, I doubt it happens with the frequency claimed on HN and reddit. Hearing more first-hand accounts of it occurring is required for me to move substantially on my opinion. As is, it's primarily speculation and people asking others to "trust them, it happens." That said, I could do without the insincere well wishes.

marklawrutgers 11y ago

I had this exact same issue with my work machine and my at home workstation. Wifi adapter completely broken, I tried to revert back to Windows 8 on my work machine and it gets stuck on a black screen for over 24 hours. I tried to power down to restart it but no luck. Somehow everything got corrupted. Had to completely reformat the drive and install the operating system all over again, which it then proceeded to upgrade straight to Windows 10 again. I lost months of work but was able to recover from a backup I had a week prior to the incident. Absolutely disgusting business practice by Microsoft. The only times where a Windows 10 installation has worked well for me is when it's a brand new machine with little to no extra content on top of the existing OS. If you've used Windows 7 or 8 for over a year and accumulated a fair amount of apps, files, content, I can almost guarantee you're going to run into something breaking after the update.

chrsstrm 11y ago
Same scenario three weeks ago trying to help out my brother on his brand new Asus that came with Win 10. The wireless hardware just disappeared from the control panel so the option to update the driver wasn't available. I was about to walk him through a complete OS re-install with the option to keep his files until he decided that a wired connection was OK. At the time there was almost no available recent support articles on this issue, but I'm starting to think a Win update caused this after seeing others with the same problem. And here he was going to blame it on his kids...
- Terr_ 11y ago
  > The wireless hardware just disappeared from the control panel I installed a fresh Win10 for a family member, and the complete mess of absent/hidden/redesigned/half-duplicated control panel stuff was my first hint that I'd want to stay on Windows-7.
  - deleted 11y ago
    [deleted]
krsree 11y ago

capabit 11y ago

> Also, there seems to be a number of people here commenting very strongly in favour of Microsoft Count me (shockingly) in the pro Microsoft group here. After years and years of supporting family PCs, I understand and appreciate what they're trying to do. If you make updating something the user has to do, they'll never do it. If you prompt them to update, they'll never do it. Even if they've had the why of it explained to them many, many times. In anticipation of the inevitable "well this update famously broke X": yes, the risk of an update doing something funky outweighs the risk of running software with known and possibly currently exploited vulnerabilities.

Esau 11y ago
So safety is more important than freedom? The attorney general and the FBI must really love you.
enraged_camel 11y ago
We don't force people to vaccinate their kids, even though unvaccinated kids are a risk to herd immunity. What makes you think it's OK to force users to update their computers?
- adiabatty 11y ago
  Actually, we do. We here in California have pockets of parents who refuse to vaccinate their kids — to the point where a school full of them starts to lose herd immunity. Within the past twelve months, our governor signed a law significantly tightening the requirements to get an exemption; http://www.mercurynews.com/ci_28407108/gov-jerry-brown-signs-californias-new-vaccine-bill http://www.mercurynews.com/ci_28407108/gov-jerry-brown-signs... says that only medical exemptions will get you out of vaccinating your kids here in California.
makecheck 11y ago
Even if Microsoft was just tired of having to ask the user for every little thing, there is a gulf between “ask the user if he or she wants to update” and “auto-install multi-gigabyte blob that changes everything, over a data plan that we don’t pay for, affecting users in dozens of ways that we cannot possibly know in advance” (as Microsoft has now chosen to do). Microsoft could have started really small with this, even updating a single app. There is no non-marketing reason to simultaneously change massive amounts of software. And since it is now clear that parts of Windows 10 really are half-baked (like duplicate settings panels), there are clearly some things that should have waited for a later update, once there was time to finish them. And you know, Microsoft has made billions and billions from software so frankly they do not get to screw around here. Nobody with that much money and that many engineers should get an ounce of sympathy for being so incompetent. They needed to start by doing a lot less, with a lot more care and attention.

marvy 11y ago

This is madness. I've actually had the "opposite" problem. Ever since Win10 came out, my Win7 machine doesn't bother announcing when updates are available. I have to remember to install them myself ever "patch Tuesday". But I repeat: this is madness. What kind of a psycho update mechanism would try to install an new OS behind your back?

edwhitesell 11y ago
> I've actually had the "opposite" problem. Ever since Win10 came out, my Win7 machine doesn't bother announcing when updates are available. I have to remember to install them myself ever "patch Tuesday". I also had this issue until I sat down and figured out how to make Windows Update stop forcing Windows 10 on me. Basically, you need to remove KB3035583, hide it from updates AND uncheck the box to "give me recommended updates the same way I receive important updates". Otherwise, it would keep coming back. This latest patch Tuesday also introduced another "update" to trigger Win10 installation, it's called: upgrade to Windows 10 Pro, version 1511, 10586 Hiding that in Windows Update got me back to installing the normal updates. Microsoft is making this whole process way too painful for those of us who know we don't want to update.
- deciplex 11y ago
  That will work until they make KB3035583 "Important" again. Basically, the way they're going, it's only a matter of time before Win 7 & 8 basically don't work anymore.
  - kefka 11y ago
    Eh. I just turn updates off. It solves the issue sufficiently.
    - deciplex 11y ago
      Yes. Pretty much this. You do need some updates though, and Microsoft hardly does a good job of describing what each update does from WU itself, so hope you like looking up each individual update on the MS website. Eventually they'll just start obfuscating what an update does on the website as well, if not lying outright.

vacri 11y ago

> The worst part of this is that if you can't get internet, you can't even download new drivers to try and debug the problem. I have a friend who made a slipstream installer of XP that was the barebones base installer... plus 696 network drivers. I think it was 696, may have been 676. He'd found a package of "every XP network driver ever". Anyway, "This iso will install XP that can get you connected to download everything else..." made for a very useful bit of kit.

ebbv 11y ago

> Also, there seems to be a number of people here commenting very strongly in favour of Microsoft, which I find very surprising. Perhaps people from MS trying to do damage control? Sometime in the last couple years Microsoft has realized how important online discussion is to a company's reputation and has begun an aggressive campaign of let's call it "community outreach". Unfortunately though it appears to me to be astro turfing, the admins here and elsewhere seem to believe it to be legitimate, so whatever techniques they're using are sophisticated.

jdietrich 11y ago

>Also, there seems to be a number of people here commenting very strongly in favour of Microsoft, which I find very surprising. I think it's an issue of trust. On the one hand, Microsoft have taken some positive steps - making meaningful OSS contributions, following standards in Edge, making sensible statements about crypto etc. On the other hand, Microsoft have an atrocious track record of corporate citizenship, typified by the Halloween memos. While they have been making progress, they are still a long way from perfect. Even if their current actions were beyond reproach, rebuilding trust takes time. I think some people on HN want to give Microsoft the benefit of the doubt, while others think it's just the same old bullshit under a new coat of paint. Personally, I think we should take each issue on merit. Praise where praise is due and criticise where criticism is due.

zanny 11y ago

Just anecdotally : I have my grandmother, brother, and his mother on Kubuntu, and my mother on Lubuntu. So far, the most updates anyone has gone through is 3 (my mother went from 10.04 to 12.04 to 14.04 and soon 16.04) and we have never had an issue. Oh, and you get to chose when to do the upgrades rather than having them backdoored on you. Desktop Linux works fine for regular people. They aren't going to go digging in the terminal to brick their own computer. Show them the software center and that their app store uses things online called apt links and anyone with a smartphone understands it fine.

Cub3 11y ago
Set my girlfriend up with a Chromebook for this very reason. An "open and go" computer that fits her needs (and reduces the tech support calls to me)

CoffeeDregs 11y ago

Drive-by-upgrade... Happened to my wife's Windows 8 computer late last week with no warning. She was puzzled to wake up to a computer that had been upgraded without asking her. Then she couldn't use our home printer. So she went to work to print something. But then she couldn't use the work WiFi. I know that her Windows 10 experience will be better than her terrible Windows 8 experience, but this seems clearly to be a maneuver to minimize the Software Support Reserve line on the Income Statement. I'm all for upgrading users from a crappy Windows 8 to a nice Windows 10. That said, my wife is a reasonably sophisticated user and she didn't notice any significant notification before her computer was upgraded. [... And, when I talked with her about the upgrade, she mentioned that she was now getting toolbar pop-ups asking her "How likely are you to recommend Windows to a friend?" WTF.]

dang 11y ago

> people here commenting very strongly in favour of Microsoft, which I find very surprising. Perhaps people from MS trying to do damage control I realize you didn't mean to, but this triggered a whole off-topic discussion about imaginary astroturfing, vote-brigading, and shilling. When we see evidence of these behaviors we crack down on them hard. But people are far too ready (by at least an order of magnitude, probably two) to impute this behavior to others merely because they have an opposing opinion. That's not evidence, and the discussion should never go there on that (non-)basis. All: if you suspect astroturfing in HN threads, please let us know at hn@ycombinator.com so we can investigate, and please don't go on about it in the threads unless there's real evidence. An opposing opinion is not evidence!