Backtracking? You have got to be kidding me. This tool has been available for a while now… a long while. The problem is you have to know the exact date of a driver release ahead of time if you want to block it and this doesn’t solve any real problems. One bad driver can wreck your entire system and even damage hardware, which means even with this tool, you are still at risk of that. Not to mention that not all drivers are easily “rolled back” to previous versions. Some bad driver installations can require you to reformat and install your entire system from scratch. How does the potential of that not enrage everyone?
Imagine you’re gaming and suddenly you start to lag. That’s weird you think, I’m not doing anything else online. You shrug it off. A few minutes later your screen goes black and your machine shuts off. Why? Because Windows forcibly downloaded and installed a gpu driver which wasn’t compatible. This happened to… wow… a massive amount of people when Windows 10 launched. This was just one piece of hardware in a basic computer which utilizes a heap of different drivers.
Now some people were lucky and they could roll the driver back. Some had to format their hard drive and reinstall their entire operating system, programs, games, drivers, etc. from scratch. That takes a long time. Not a gamer? Now imagine this happened to you in the middle of working on a work project that had a deadline. No? Imagine you’re not computer savvy at all and your system just shuts off due to a bad driver. You won’t have a clue how to rollback a driver, boot up in Safe Mode, etc. You’re effectively screwed and will spend hours upon hours on the phone talking to someone.
You also have people who use the internet with specific bandwidth caps, or restrictions and depend on the ability to manually schedule what date and time of the day they get and can install updates. What happens when they start getting forced downloads during their peak hours when they can’t afford to go over their bandwidth? How about the enthusiasts who spend thousands on a machine which they monitor and are methodical about what is installed, when it is installed, and how it is installed? Who is at fault when a forced driver breaks a piece of hardware? Its happened to me – A bad graphics driver caused my gpu’s fan to fail and the card burned up. An extreme example, but very valid.
None of this sums up the major problem with this automatic update system. You are agreeing to let Microsoft install anything they want on your computer whenever they want without warning. Think about that.
I get some of the reasoning behind this. There’s a lot of people who are not computer savvy that don’t update security patches, etc. because they don’t know how. They get viruses, malware, etc. which puts other internet users at risk. Automatic updates would help some of that, but the negatives grossly outweigh the positives here. An easy fix for this would have simply been to have automatic updates be ON by default where they were downloaded and installed in the background. At least this would cover the people who don’t know anything about computers, and it would allow the people that want full control over their system to keep full control of their system by simply changing the default ON back to manual.
We live in an ever increasing technological world where the “tech savvy” are quickly changing from the minority to the majority. With that change you see consumers wanting full control over their systems, which is one reason why there is such a massive uproar about these automatic updates. Consumers want things on their terms and their own schedules. Microsoft got a rude awakening to this with Windows 8 when they tried to force consumers into a tablet style layout, etc. It failed miserably – queue Windows 8.1 because of that. Now they’re making the same mistake by forcing yet another aspect of Windows upon the consumer. This one, however, with far more serious consequences.
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Backtracking? You have got to be kidding me. This tool has been available for a while now… a long while. The problem is you have to know the exact date of a driver release ahead of time if you want to block it and this doesn’t solve any real problems. One bad driver can wreck your entire system and even damage hardware, which means even with this tool, you are still at risk of that. Not to mention that not all drivers are easily “rolled back” to previous versions. Some bad driver installations can require you to reformat and install your entire system from scratch. How does the potential of that not enrage everyone?
Imagine you’re gaming and suddenly you start to lag. That’s weird you think, I’m not doing anything else online. You shrug it off. A few minutes later your screen goes black and your machine shuts off. Why? Because Windows forcibly downloaded and installed a gpu driver which wasn’t compatible. This happened to… wow… a massive amount of people when Windows 10 launched. This was just one piece of hardware in a basic computer which utilizes a heap of different drivers.
Now some people were lucky and they could roll the driver back. Some had to format their hard drive and reinstall their entire operating system, programs, games, drivers, etc. from scratch. That takes a long time. Not a gamer? Now imagine this happened to you in the middle of working on a work project that had a deadline. No? Imagine you’re not computer savvy at all and your system just shuts off due to a bad driver. You won’t have a clue how to rollback a driver, boot up in Safe Mode, etc. You’re effectively screwed and will spend hours upon hours on the phone talking to someone.
You also have people who use the internet with specific bandwidth caps, or restrictions and depend on the ability to manually schedule what date and time of the day they get and can install updates. What happens when they start getting forced downloads during their peak hours when they can’t afford to go over their bandwidth? How about the enthusiasts who spend thousands on a machine which they monitor and are methodical about what is installed, when it is installed, and how it is installed? Who is at fault when a forced driver breaks a piece of hardware? Its happened to me – A bad graphics driver caused my gpu’s fan to fail and the card burned up. An extreme example, but very valid.
None of this sums up the major problem with this automatic update system. You are agreeing to let Microsoft install anything they want on your computer whenever they want without warning. Think about that.
I get some of the reasoning behind this. There’s a lot of people who are not computer savvy that don’t update security patches, etc. because they don’t know how. They get viruses, malware, etc. which puts other internet users at risk. Automatic updates would help some of that, but the negatives grossly outweigh the positives here. An easy fix for this would have simply been to have automatic updates be ON by default where they were downloaded and installed in the background. At least this would cover the people who don’t know anything about computers, and it would allow the people that want full control over their system to keep full control of their system by simply changing the default ON back to manual.
We live in an ever increasing technological world where the “tech savvy” are quickly changing from the minority to the majority. With that change you see consumers wanting full control over their systems, which is one reason why there is such a massive uproar about these automatic updates. Consumers want things on their terms and their own schedules. Microsoft got a rude awakening to this with Windows 8 when they tried to force consumers into a tablet style layout, etc. It failed miserably – queue Windows 8.1 because of that. Now they’re making the same mistake by forcing yet another aspect of Windows upon the consumer. This one, however, with far more serious consequences.