5 ms·

And yet Windows 7 is supposed to keep getting security updates until 2020. Computer illiterate users are the last group you should upgrade to a new system in an

by creshal 10y ago

And yet Windows 7 is supposed to keep getting security updates until 2020. Computer illiterate users are the last group you should upgrade to a new system in an automated manner, because they are the most helpless if drivers/applications break from it.

snuxoll 10y ago
This is why the Windows 10 installer does a compatibility check before performing the upgrade. My friend was trying to upgrade to Windows 10 last week but it kept denying him saying his "display is not compatible". I logged into his machine and saw he had an old GoToMyPC monitor driver installed that was causing him grief, uninstalled it and away the upgrade went. It's not perfect by any means, and "compatibility" checks often never will be, but I think it does a good enough job to prevent breaking a working system that isn't ready for the upgrade yet.
- Decade 10y ago
  I installed Windows 10, and then discovered that the third-party driver that I needed for work was not compatible. Namely, the Roland REAC Driver. That driver acts as a network protocol that you attach to a particular network adapter, so when I upgraded, the adapter showed up as having no protocols. Totally Roland’s fault, waiting until the final release of Windows 10 before even starting to work on upgrading their drivers, but Microsoft also gets some blame for thinking that only Microsoft network protocols matter. The rollback worked, so no lasting harm that I’ve noticed, yet.
  - slantedview 10y ago
    > I installed Windows 10, and then discovered that the third-party driver that I needed for work was not compatible Similar. I KNOW that my wifi adapter's driver is not compatible with Windows 10. So were I to upgrade, I'd have no Wifi until I buy a new adapter, which I don't want to do for that machine. So the constant harassment to upgrade is frustrating.
- turnip1979 10y ago
  See my post above. Windows thought my father's touchscreen laptop was a tablet, and put him in tablet-only mode by default.
  - snuxoll 10y ago
    And? I said the Windows 10 installer makes efforts to avoid breaking working systems and does a decent job at it, Windows 10's confusing tablet-mode switching is a different issue entirely (my wife turned it on by accident on her Surface Pro just the other day and couldn't figure out what she did).
- Bartweiss 10y ago
  That's great for systems which are simply too old to handle the upgrade, but Windows has an ugly history of releasing upgrades which are uncaught breaking changes for some machines. I think release-day Windows 7, 8, 8.1, and 10 all broke wifi connectivity for a large swath of users. At least one Windows 7 patch bricked a large number of Asus motherboards, and the Windows 10 upgrade did the same to a smaller number of Asus machines. The usual story is that rapid adoption of Windows upgrades is basically volunteering your machine as a guinea pig, to the point that a lot of people won't adopt a new version until after Service Pack 1. Compatibility checks don't really stand in the way of pushing broken upgrades on people who can't fix them...
  - snuxoll 10y ago
    I didn't say it was perfect, but I would be surprised if it didn't block more potential issues than it missed.
    - creshal 10y ago
      Is a 51% success rate really good enough to justify unleashing the OS upgrade right now? Why not make the upgrade opt-in, continue improving the migration wizard over the next years, and start the upgrade campaign in two or three years when it becomes both stable and more pressing to migrate people over?
      - snuxoll 10y ago
        It would be less of an issue if more vendors submitted drivers to Windows Update. As much as I am "happy" with my cheap TP-Link 802.11ac NIC (I use a lot of TP-Link gear in my house, my TG1600-24TS switch is great for the price too) I literally cannot reinstall Windows without having the driver disk at hand or plugging in my powerline network adapter to download the drivers from their website. A lot of these issues could be mitigated by this alone, as the first thing that the Windows installer does (if you are upgrading from a running system) is check windows update for updates to the installer and compatible device drivers. I agree that maybe they shouldn't be so persistent on trying to get people to upgrade this early, especially if you have a NIC that isn't supported out of the box or has a driver that isn't on Windows Update (because I know the first thing I do when unboxing new hardware is throw the damned CD away, the only thing I use the DVD drive in my PC for is ripping movies).
- dragonwriter 10y ago
  > This is why the Windows 10 installer does a compatibility check before performing the upgrade. Which would be nice, if it worked 100%. But it doesn't, so that's a problem for non-technical users. In fact, the Win10 upgrade on my Win 8.1 laptop "helpfully" rolled-back the touchpad driver from the latest driver designed for Win 8.1 -- which works fine with Win 10 -- to the original Win 8 driver, which doesn't function at all under Win 10. Now, I'm not non-technical user, and it was straightforward for me to hunt down the installed version of the touchpad driver, realize the problem, go to the manufacturer's website and download the latest Win 8.1 version, install it, and go on with life. And I had an external BT mouse which didn't have a driver problem to use while I was doing that, and enough proficiency that I could have probably done what I needed to do with the keyboard anyway. But, had I been a nontechnical user...
  - wvenable 10y ago
    I had this exact problem as well. I had to download the old version of the driver just to uninstall it and then I installed the latest Windows 10 driver. Problem solved. But it was the one thing that went wrong with it.
  - acqq 10y ago
    Exactly, I have two notebooks on which Windows 10 Update claimed "everything's OK" and one is completely unusable under Windows 10 because the WiFi card driver is unsupported by Intel and crashes the whole system, and another is unusable because the touchpad doesn't work anymore. On the former, even rolling back to Windows 7 turned bad, as all tasks (created by Microsoft, not by me) became somehow invalid.
  - blakeyrat 10y ago
    Well if it doesn't work 100% of the time, they shouldn't bother to try at all. Let's just curl up in the basement and cry instead.
- doodpants 10y ago
  But this only supports creshal's point about computer illiterate users. If you hadn't been there to help, would your friend have been able to resolve this on his own?
  - snuxoll 10y ago
    My friend wasn't illiterate, this was more a UX problem of the installer (your display isn't compatible). He had gone and cleaned his system of all but the essentials and had uninstalled GoToMyPC months ago, he just couldn't figure out WTF the installer was talking about (he assumed it had something to do with his video card, a R9 290, which he made certain he was using the most recent drivers for - and our entire group of friends uses the same card and upgraded with no issues). If the installer just clearly stated that the "GoToMyPC Display Adapter" wasn't compatible he would have quickly whipped open device manager and removed it - hell, it even took me about 10 minutes to figure out WTF it was talking about and I am the go-to guy for fixing PC problems. Honestly, that is a lot of the problems with the Windows 10 upgrade experience, poor UX (something which Microsoft has rarely been known for during install/upgrade time). I have never seen a machine just randomly upgrade itself to Windows 10, but the way Microsoft presents the damned pop up has a big blue "Yes, please!" button that most people are just going to click to make it go away - then come back shocked that their system "upgraded itself". It's entirely anecdotal, but there is 6 computers I manage for myself and my family, out of the 4 that don't live in my house (some random Dell AIO, a Lenovo Yoga, Lenovo IdeaPad S405, Dell XPS tower) between the time I last worked on them and the next they had been upgraded to Windows 10 without any issue and without any complaint. To be fair, they were all running Windows 8.1 already, so there wasn't a bunch of shocking UX changes outside of Cortana. All of these systems were owned illiterate users, my grandmother, mother and aunt. To be fair, there wasn't any odd hardware configurations, but nonetheless I was shocked that these systems were upgraded without me even getting asked in "why does this look different" questions.
- criddell 10y ago
  It does a compatibility check, then upgrades anyway. I rely on a VNC client that Microsoft decided won't work in W10. Microsoft helpfully uninstalled the VNC client. After W10 started, it did tell me what it had done. I was able to just reinstall the exact same client it removed and it works fine.
- tremon 10y ago
  This is why the Windows 10 installer does a compatibility check before performing the upgrade It fails. My father was forced to buy a new scanner (Canon I believe, one with an inlay for scanning photo-negatives) and a new soundcard (Xonar DX) because of lack of support. The soundcard itself still worked though, but none of the supporting tools (equalizer, multichannel processor, softvol control).

by creshal 10y ago

snuxoll 10y ago

This is why the Windows 10 installer does a compatibility check before performing the upgrade. My friend was trying to upgrade to Windows 10 last week but it kept denying him saying his "display is not compatible". I logged into his machine and saw he had an old GoToMyPC monitor driver installed that was causing him grief, uninstalled it and away the upgrade went. It's not perfect by any means, and "compatibility" checks often never will be, but I think it does a good enough job to prevent breaking a working system that isn't ready for the upgrade yet.

Decade 10y ago
I installed Windows 10, and then discovered that the third-party driver that I needed for work was not compatible. Namely, the Roland REAC Driver. That driver acts as a network protocol that you attach to a particular network adapter, so when I upgraded, the adapter showed up as having no protocols. Totally Roland’s fault, waiting until the final release of Windows 10 before even starting to work on upgrading their drivers, but Microsoft also gets some blame for thinking that only Microsoft network protocols matter. The rollback worked, so no lasting harm that I’ve noticed, yet.
- slantedview 10y ago
  > I installed Windows 10, and then discovered that the third-party driver that I needed for work was not compatible Similar. I KNOW that my wifi adapter's driver is not compatible with Windows 10. So were I to upgrade, I'd have no Wifi until I buy a new adapter, which I don't want to do for that machine. So the constant harassment to upgrade is frustrating.
turnip1979 10y ago
See my post above. Windows thought my father's touchscreen laptop was a tablet, and put him in tablet-only mode by default.
- snuxoll 10y ago
  And? I said the Windows 10 installer makes efforts to avoid breaking working systems and does a decent job at it, Windows 10's confusing tablet-mode switching is a different issue entirely (my wife turned it on by accident on her Surface Pro just the other day and couldn't figure out what she did).
Bartweiss 10y ago
That's great for systems which are simply too old to handle the upgrade, but Windows has an ugly history of releasing upgrades which are uncaught breaking changes for some machines. I think release-day Windows 7, 8, 8.1, and 10 all broke wifi connectivity for a large swath of users. At least one Windows 7 patch bricked a large number of Asus motherboards, and the Windows 10 upgrade did the same to a smaller number of Asus machines. The usual story is that rapid adoption of Windows upgrades is basically volunteering your machine as a guinea pig, to the point that a lot of people won't adopt a new version until after Service Pack 1. Compatibility checks don't really stand in the way of pushing broken upgrades on people who can't fix them...
- snuxoll 10y ago
  I didn't say it was perfect, but I would be surprised if it didn't block more potential issues than it missed.
  - creshal 10y ago
    Is a 51% success rate really good enough to justify unleashing the OS upgrade right now? Why not make the upgrade opt-in, continue improving the migration wizard over the next years, and start the upgrade campaign in two or three years when it becomes both stable and more pressing to migrate people over?
    - snuxoll 10y ago
      It would be less of an issue if more vendors submitted drivers to Windows Update. As much as I am "happy" with my cheap TP-Link 802.11ac NIC (I use a lot of TP-Link gear in my house, my TG1600-24TS switch is great for the price too) I literally cannot reinstall Windows without having the driver disk at hand or plugging in my powerline network adapter to download the drivers from their website. A lot of these issues could be mitigated by this alone, as the first thing that the Windows installer does (if you are upgrading from a running system) is check windows update for updates to the installer and compatible device drivers. I agree that maybe they shouldn't be so persistent on trying to get people to upgrade this early, especially if you have a NIC that isn't supported out of the box or has a driver that isn't on Windows Update (because I know the first thing I do when unboxing new hardware is throw the damned CD away, the only thing I use the DVD drive in my PC for is ripping movies).
dragonwriter 10y ago
> This is why the Windows 10 installer does a compatibility check before performing the upgrade. Which would be nice, if it worked 100%. But it doesn't, so that's a problem for non-technical users. In fact, the Win10 upgrade on my Win 8.1 laptop "helpfully" rolled-back the touchpad driver from the latest driver designed for Win 8.1 -- which works fine with Win 10 -- to the original Win 8 driver, which doesn't function at all under Win 10. Now, I'm not non-technical user, and it was straightforward for me to hunt down the installed version of the touchpad driver, realize the problem, go to the manufacturer's website and download the latest Win 8.1 version, install it, and go on with life. And I had an external BT mouse which didn't have a driver problem to use while I was doing that, and enough proficiency that I could have probably done what I needed to do with the keyboard anyway. But, had I been a nontechnical user...
- wvenable 10y ago
  I had this exact problem as well. I had to download the old version of the driver just to uninstall it and then I installed the latest Windows 10 driver. Problem solved. But it was the one thing that went wrong with it.
- acqq 10y ago
  Exactly, I have two notebooks on which Windows 10 Update claimed "everything's OK" and one is completely unusable under Windows 10 because the WiFi card driver is unsupported by Intel and crashes the whole system, and another is unusable because the touchpad doesn't work anymore. On the former, even rolling back to Windows 7 turned bad, as all tasks (created by Microsoft, not by me) became somehow invalid.
- blakeyrat 10y ago
  Well if it doesn't work 100% of the time, they shouldn't bother to try at all. Let's just curl up in the basement and cry instead.
doodpants 10y ago
But this only supports creshal's point about computer illiterate users. If you hadn't been there to help, would your friend have been able to resolve this on his own?
- snuxoll 10y ago
  My friend wasn't illiterate, this was more a UX problem of the installer (your display isn't compatible). He had gone and cleaned his system of all but the essentials and had uninstalled GoToMyPC months ago, he just couldn't figure out WTF the installer was talking about (he assumed it had something to do with his video card, a R9 290, which he made certain he was using the most recent drivers for - and our entire group of friends uses the same card and upgraded with no issues). If the installer just clearly stated that the "GoToMyPC Display Adapter" wasn't compatible he would have quickly whipped open device manager and removed it - hell, it even took me about 10 minutes to figure out WTF it was talking about and I am the go-to guy for fixing PC problems. Honestly, that is a lot of the problems with the Windows 10 upgrade experience, poor UX (something which Microsoft has rarely been known for during install/upgrade time). I have never seen a machine just randomly upgrade itself to Windows 10, but the way Microsoft presents the damned pop up has a big blue "Yes, please!" button that most people are just going to click to make it go away - then come back shocked that their system "upgraded itself". It's entirely anecdotal, but there is 6 computers I manage for myself and my family, out of the 4 that don't live in my house (some random Dell AIO, a Lenovo Yoga, Lenovo IdeaPad S405, Dell XPS tower) between the time I last worked on them and the next they had been upgraded to Windows 10 without any issue and without any complaint. To be fair, they were all running Windows 8.1 already, so there wasn't a bunch of shocking UX changes outside of Cortana. All of these systems were owned illiterate users, my grandmother, mother and aunt. To be fair, there wasn't any odd hardware configurations, but nonetheless I was shocked that these systems were upgraded without me even getting asked in "why does this look different" questions.
criddell 10y ago
It does a compatibility check, then upgrades anyway. I rely on a VNC client that Microsoft decided won't work in W10. Microsoft helpfully uninstalled the VNC client. After W10 started, it did tell me what it had done. I was able to just reinstall the exact same client it removed and it works fine.
tremon 10y ago
This is why the Windows 10 installer does a compatibility check before performing the upgrade It fails. My father was forced to buy a new scanner (Canon I believe, one with an inlay for scanning photo-negatives) and a new soundcard (Xonar DX) because of lack of support. The soundcard itself still worked though, but none of the supporting tools (equalizer, multichannel processor, softvol control).