Intel draws fire for not supporting Win10 drivers on “Sandy Bridge” processors

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Intel’s not going to distribute some drivers, even for top-of-the-line i3, i5 or i7 machines from a few years ago. InfoWorld Woody on Windows Thanks f
[See the full post at: Intel draws fire for not supporting Win10 drivers on “Sandy Bridge” processors]

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Any idea what the motive is? I can’t work out what the positive is for ruining the relationship with MS and their customers.

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Motive? You’d have to ask them, but my guess is that they don’t want to pay to develop and support the Win10 drivers.

If past is any indication, they don’t have to worry about alienating MS. After all, MS is the group that said they would cut off support for Win7 and 8.1 early on Skylake processors. Their customers… that’s another story.

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AMD will be celebrating this amazing Intel own goal. Abandoning support for millions of recently bought computers is stupidity of the first order which will see many affected customers look elsewhere when a replacement is needed. Rather than forcing people to buy more Intel products, this stupid decision could trigger its demise. Perhaps no great loss if that is their idea of customer support.

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Looks like MS’s attitude toward its customers is contagious and spreading.
Now Intel’s caught it.
Wonder who’ll be next.

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My Gen-1 Core-i5 Toshiba Satellite laptop came through a Windows 10 upgrade perfectly well, and runs just fine on the 1511 update. There may come a future time when this 2010-era laptop can’t keep up with Win 10 developments, but as of now I have all the drivers I need. Mind you, these are Toshiba drivers, not Intel’s very own drivers.

Also, this version of the Core-i5 processor never had Miracast or other advanced capabilities. But it does still have working NVidia-Intel hybrid graphics. (NVidia’s most recent driver updates don’t work on this hybrid graphics hardware anymore, so the handwriting is definitely on the wall.) For waht the laptop always used to do, it still does everything I’ve tested with video under Windows 10.

And whatever may not work under Windows, sometimes can be given a bit more life by using Linux instead. NVidia systems can be challenging, and WiDi or Miracast is virtually nonexistent in Linux, but Windows video issues can sometimes be overcome by switching to Linux.

I’d say six or seven years of use is pretty good for a laptop.

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This was pretty similar to users with onboard Intel 910/915 graphics chipsets and the Vista/Win7 problem where Intel did NOT make WDDM based graphics drivers for 910/915 series chipsets and only made XP-based or XPDM/XDDM based video drivers.

My family’s Dell Inspiron 620 desktop computer that we got in late 2011 uses Sandy Bridge hardware with onboard Intel HD Graphics 2000 video – I’m not upgrading it to Win10 anytime soon and will keep using Win7 on it since Intel decided not to make any Win10 specific Intel HD graphics 2000/3000 drivers.

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I am one of those ”affected” by this issue about which I had no idea before the original post here on askwoody.com
I own a Dell XPS 15 (L502) bought more than 4 or maybe 5 years ago which has 2 graphics cards, Intel HD Graphics 3000 and NVIDIA GeForce GT 540M.
The Intel Graphics driver installed is version 9.17.10.4229 dated 9 May 2015 and as far as I can tell is working correctly, except for the fact that as it was posted here and on the Intel web site, it might miss newer features which I normally don’t believe I use.
There may be an option for the NVIDIA card serving only the second monitor to take over for the missing features. If anyone knows about this, please let us know as this may be a useful workaround.
I upgraded the NVIDIA driver yesterday for no functional reason, just to have the latest release and that older NVIDIA graphics card seems to still have full support.
Not going to replace this laptop for the reason of Intel not supporting new features, still believe that for non-multimedia applications the Intel Graphics cards are by far the most stable on the market.
For gaming and the latest and greatest features it is a different story but generally there is a price to pay for this – overheating, less stability, driver releases every few weeks and the process of their upgrade is as annoying as the forced upgrades for Windows 10.
And one more thing, after my first XPS I became a fan and the next one will likely be another XPS, unless I will win the lottery in which case I may think about trying the latest Surface 🙂

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Anyone who used AMD CPUs in the last few years for anything performance related and not price would probably have a different opinion. And while we are discussing Graphics cards here, I am not convinced that the AMD (ATI) offering is a better alternative either.

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Financial reasons for certain. I think they did their calculations and found that the number of affected customers and their buying schedule would not affect their bottom line, quite the opposite. It is as simple as that, large companies regularly tend to ignore certain categories of buyers.

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I’m testing one of the new XPS-15’s, and I’d take it over any Surface, any day. Of course, it’s much larger and heavier.

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Is Microsoft’s intent to encourage or discourage. Because if Windows 10 doesn’t run Sandy Bridge… I’m going grab as much Sandy Bridge hardware as I can get my hands on!

Thanks Microsoft now I don’t have to worry about your intrusive, crappy software AND I can save $$$ on the hardware too!

I salute the knuckleheads in the MS marketing department!

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Yesterdays article from ITNews and ComputerWorld

ITNEWS – “By forcing customers to upgrade to a newer version of IE — or alternately, turn to Windows 10 and its default Edge — Microsoft demanded that users change browsers. That had a disastrous impact on IE’s user share as people rethought their browser choice, and then abandoned Microsoft’s browsers for rivals’

Computerworld has attributed IE’s defections to Microsoft’s August 2014 announcement that users of older versions had to upgrade, in most cases, to IE11, by Jan. 12, 2016. Since the announcement, IE has lost 15.1 percentage points of user share, representing a 26% decline.

Can anyone draw a parallel conclusion?

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Easy double-whammy from monopolised hardware and software makers:
– Want Windows 10? Buy new hardware.
– Got recent hardware? Upgrade to Win10 or lose support.
This cosy alliance between Intel and Microsoft is very scary and should be investigated.

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I think it’s a slam-dunk.

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My current machine is a Dell Alienware Aurora-R3 with a 2011 build Sandy Bridge 17-2600. I’ve embellished it quite a bit since purchasing it new and looks like I should be able to upgrade the GPU yet again to a GTX 980 Ti and maybe a CPU upgrade before considering a new build. I read somewhere, my machine cannot upgrade to Windows 10, but even if it could, I will not do it now knowing no future support will exist except thru the tech gurus at the Alienware forums. Do the think-tank people at Microsoft actually do any real thinking, to abandon its supporters? Thanks for the report.

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I realize that INTEL is having problems but to alienate users will not help. By abandoning WIDI users with gen 2 processors they are cutting off future sales. I would never have thought that a company that touts “INTEL INSIDE” would tell its users that they will not update the driver to the new windows 10 os. So without WIDI our school laptops can no longer be used to display content to our projectors. INTEL has been no help and telling us to just replace all the laptops is crazy.

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