Drivers from microsoft good or bad?

@arlawson83
You can only get generic drivers from Microsoft to get Windows working first. For old computers, it's hard to find anything else, but for newer ones, they're generally only a last resort, however after installing Windows should install new drivers from producer.

 

Since Win7 the drivers from WU are usually very good (and often more stable than the beeding edge ones coming from the OEM)

No need to fix anything that's not broken, but there are exceptions, like VGA drivers updated to support a specific AAA game released "yesterday" or to support a new feature released with monthly updates, like WSLg, WSA, GPU P or alike.

 

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This is really bad answer telling op to install some old drivers. Of course someone can use WU to install hardware drivers but theyre almost never good.

 

People (especially kids like you) should should learn to care about working drivers rather than newst one, be sure that MS guys understand the matter better than you.

 

the only older driver on my pc i use is gpu driver and thats only because of i play mario odyssey and that game isnt compatible with a newer drivers as it was made in 2018. apart from that chipset nvmes audio etc everything newest possible drivers.

plus calling people like me a kid sounds kind of nice and sweet esp knowing i could likely be your grandad maybe even am.

 

FYI I was a Lenovo "guru" for a couple of decades and I know personally most of the people involved in their web side, so I'm not exactly the less informed person about how Lenovo things work

 

It make me laugh, when people think they know better than MS guys, i mean, come on these guys eat computer code for breakfast...

 

Such people exist, but surely they are a tiny minority and usually they aren't used popping from nowhere just to parrot bar/pub like discussions.

 

MS does not make drivers, they occasionally certify/test some drivers from manufacturers and mark them as WHQL and that is it. But they are very bad at it, like 11 using Realtek LAN driver from 2015, while the latest one fixes many issues.

That might have been the case before outsourcing, but in the current state of MS, the left hand does not want what the right one is doing. MS is thousands of people, who do not know, what others are doing, because the code is encrypted to prevent it from being stolen, so no one knows how his code affects the rest, it is a mess. I am sure that your blind trust will make MS CEO smirk, because even he knows, that Windows is as unstable as ever and it will only get worse with AI.

 

Obvious MS makes most of the drivers needed to boot a PC, to the networking stack and so on.
What MS doesn't make are the OEM drivers, they just can't, because they would need copyrighted documentation.

Even in the Linux world the worst companies like Nvidia, Broadcomm and similar crap, don't provide what's needed to build proper drivers from source

Outsourcing and fired people to please the shareholders is not a MS thing, is consequences of the rotten form of capitalism we are currently living, which affects almost any big (and not so big) company in the western (and not so western) world.

As for right hand not knowing what the left hand does, again it's something that happens (and happened) in most big organization.

In short there isn't any good guys at (Nvidia, Intel, Realtek...) v.s. the lazy guys at MS.

There is just the common sense of users (rare nowadays) and sysadmins (not so common either especially in younger ones), and the common sense tells that a driver that is left untouched after 5/6/7 years of being pushed automatically in wild, is a good driver, maybe not the fastest of the galaxy but surely a stable and working one.

 

Yeah, mature drivers are to be preferred. In many cases, the core drivers don't change for long periods, anyway, what's causing new releases is the bloatware included that is updated to include the latest brainfarts of the bloatware devs.

 

The Intel LAN drivers from Windows update don’t support WOL. I would always install my own drivers for GPU, Audio, Ethernet, Wifi and Bluetooth. Rest of the drivers I let Microsoft Windows Update do its thing.

The worst offender is Intel GPU drivers which WU overrides any of Your installed latest GPU driver and installs some random old driver. You have to use the Driver Rollback feature in device manager.

 

Windows Update is just a means of distribution. For some hardware, e.g. ethernet adapters, there are not a lot of updates pushed through WU. For WiFi/Bluetooth however, where security and compatibility issues are more common, Intel regularly submits stable driver updates (after going through WHQL and other processes) to Microsoft for release through Windows Update for non-OEM components (e.g. if you have a DIY desktop PC that uses an Intel WiFi/Bluetooth chip). These updates are the same as offered on intel.com, and are submitted by the vendor (in this case Intel), it's just that Microsoft has the final say in the distribution.

What people generally mean when they talk negatively about "Microsoft drivers", they mean that they advise against using out of date drivers that may not receive updates on their own. There are also some other legacy reasons that I won't go into because Windows Update and driver models within Windows have changed so much over the past 10 years, but people's views are stuck in Windows XP land.

 

I used the WOL feature on the only Intel machine I had for 5 years using the stock driver in W7/8/10/11 or the Stock driver patched to Install on servers for servers OS and WOL worked like a charm.

For Sandy/IVY bridge WU downloaded a driver from 2015 (which is perfectly working) but If I install the latest one (that Intel removed from their website) WU takes no action, no matter the OS.

 

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