Sorry, not so. When MS deletes a driver or a software as "obsolete or incompatible" during a nightly update and that hardware portion of your machine STOPS working, they have gone outside their software space and have removed functionality from your machine, once again without your consent or approval.
I have had to replace an old video card that required an ATI driver that MS would not leave alone. I replaced the card rather than fight MS over it.
And yes, I understand that MS cannot have certain drivers operational on their machine because it conflicts with the general driver direction they took and the two paths are mutually exclusive.
I had an old label maker quit working for the same reason -- and I couldn't figure out why MS hated that driver sooooo much my wife's rarely used label printer would never work whenever she needed it. I could get it to work again by reinstalling the software each time, but that was a pain in the ass so I bought my wife a new one. The old label printer now lives and works on my Linux box just fine. The old Linux driver still works great and so does the hardware.
The MS Automatic Updates system is "across the board" thing and can be very arbitrary sometimes.
The newest wrinkle on this situation is when MS develops a "generic" driver for a whole class of hardware that runs OK with most stuff and then uses the generic driver to replace your installed vendor specific driver as a convenience to themselves during updates and
all your advanced fine control features simply stop working on your video card.
And yes, if you use MS OS and automatic update functionality you REALLY ARE actually sharing control of your machine with MS.When MS reaches through the internet and manipulates JC's old Win 7 machine
to suit themselves in fashions they could never do before it is MS clearly taking control of his hardware without permission. How are they doing it? Their software updates to all OS software all now have the generic abilities to start up a turned off but still connected machine (literally your machine does NOT really shut down now even if you shut it down, it remains "listening for updates" 24/7). They just proved this to JC as he just told us about.
You may have approved this as part of an emergency update for security reasons that took place well over a year ago. Or you allowed it to install as part of a MS emergency pushed Meltdown or Spectre security patch last year. Or, since it became the MS generic default, it simply just got included as part of a vendor's update (yep, them authorized sources can give it to you too).
When you share control of your machine with MS and "authorized sources", you have done just that -- they can reach out and change the software, and by extension the shut down the hardware affected by that software.Ownership is control, and legally you have shared control of your physical machine with Microsoft. Microsoft has crossed the line a couple of times, most egregiously when they started deleting "pirated" software and "unauthorized softwares" from your hard drive.
Dual boot Linux systems with GRUB installed to control the boot up of your machine ran afoul of MS's ever changing automatic crank up stuff and
GRUB kept getting deleted about every 3 months. It was seen as "unauthorized" software.
The last case where MS very clearly went too far was several old style Antivirus softwares that would alert and quarantine any changed files when MS went into your machine at night fiddling. The old Antivirus software models saw this as a virus attack and would alert and quarantine and do all the things they were built to do, and they would do it to the things Microsoft changed. This was embarrassing to MS as MS was changing things that they had no business changing and the Antivirus was keeping a daily list of MS fiddles which then hit the internet as OMG issues. So, over a year ago MS started quietly DELETING these old style Antivirus programs from your hard drive and telling you that only Windows Defender was "authorized".
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Eegore writes:
"Regarding the nightly updates stopping people from gaming, I also have not experienced this and was wondering if there's some sort of 72 hour continual gaming process I could implement to see when this happens. Is it specific games, and is there a way to find out what time this happens?"Sorry, I have not a clue as to what you are specifically asking here. There are a few generic causes though, as follows.
In general, a specific MS Windows version x.x is required for some games. Sometimes a specific MS Direct X version x.x is required for some games. The actual game requirements are listed on the outside of the box so you can avoid dropping bucks for a game your machine cannot run. Generally all was kosher on both sides when you bought the game, but now MS has changed the OS environment while the game stays fixed as it was originally.
Sometimes games can STOP RUNNING if MS's nightly visitations changes a key driver to a version the game simply cannot deal with. Or if the update
moves where things are located, such as the directory where that particular game keeps its saved game stuff is "modernized" and renamed to something else. The game then yields a "file not found" or a "directory not found" error.
Gamers share these issues with each other in the game forums, and they then post work-arounds for tweeking most of the easy to fix stuff.
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