from Hacker News

Removal of unwanted drivers from Windows Update

by zdw on 6/20/25, 4:38 PM with 52 comments

• by rkagerer on 6/24/25, 11:02 AM

  Great. So if I interpret this correctly, when companies go out of business (or drop support for product lines), your perfectly functional hardware will now inevitably stop working (or not be installable after you reformat your OS). Welcome another step down the path toward a world where you don't really own your hardware and your vendor dictates how, when and what you can use ("we control the horizontal, we control the vertical").

  There are already some great comments in that thread, like this thoughtful one:

  While having a well organized and updated driver catalog is undoubtedly a good thing, please spare a thought for curators of vintage PC collections. The Windows Update Driver catalog is a near unrivaled resource on the internet for known good drivers, and is a great source for drivers where the original manufactures have either removed the drivers from their own websites, or they no longer exist.

  Personally I always hated the idea of using Windows Update as your warehouse for drivers in the first place. Much better to keep your own collection. (Yes, it takes some work to curate and periodically update).

• by zelphirkalt on 6/24/25, 9:45 AM

  How about first fixing, that Windows update is automatically installing inappropriate drivers for my graphics card, causing system instability and freezes? How about first fixing your shit, MS?

• by londons_explore on 6/24/25, 10:51 AM

  To my knowledge, windows update always only offers the latest version of a driver for a bit of hardware...

  Is there even a UI for a user to select an older driver version from windows update?? I know you can do it if you manually get a .inf file, but thats a different flow.

  If not, what exactly is this announcement saying? "Stuff that a user isn't able to install right now won't be available for a user to install in the future"?

• by proactivesvcs on 6/24/25, 10:47 AM

  "What category of drivers are targeted in the first cut of the cleanup?

  The first phase targets legacy drivers that have newer replacements already on Windows Update."

  It'd be useful if they listed information about the other phases; the proposal for this phase seems pretty sensible and I'm surprised they have only now started thinking about it.

• by kotaKat on 6/24/25, 10:08 AM

  Does this include going back through and ensuring they're removing malicious drivers left behind (like from the FTDI driver-bricking fiasco... numerous times over)?

• by Havoc on 6/24/25, 11:27 AM

  Seems like this would result in a ton of printers etc hitting landfills

• by neuroelectron on 6/24/25, 10:12 AM

  Yes, I have business justification. Wink wink

  We do the eavesdropping and act as a liability shield. Here's our "debug" mode and a bit extra for the effort.