Why can’t Microsoft reliably patch its own hardware?

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WOODY’S WINDOWS WATCH By Woody Leonhard You don’t need me to tell you that Windows patches are too often of, uh, questionable quality. But the latest
[See the full post at: Why can’t Microsoft reliably patch its own hardware?]

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GreatAndPowerfulTech, abbodi86

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Windows 10 1903 renders ‘Client Hyper-V’ useless as well. The problem is a new graphics driver handling enhanced session mode RDP causing VMConnect windows to freeze when the host moves the monitor into sleep mode. Even worse, the new graphics driver leaks quite a bit of memory (25+ MB) each time a VMConnect window is resized or flipped between full-screen and normal mode. Microsoft is aware of this for months (see feedback hub), but a fix is not in sight.

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because Microsoft is a software company that is good at OS but not so much of anything else

 

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MS does not impress me as being that great at software either. For the highest stock-market valued company of them all, one would thing they could well afford to use just a few of their billions to employ and equip adequately some competent engineers to manage and staff the software and hardware divisions, or whatever these are called in their company’s organigram.

In exchange for that tiny expense, they could save themselves tons and tons of continuous embarrassment.

https://qz.com/1639275/microsoft-shares-are-at-a-high-under-nadella-now-with-a-1-trillion-market-cap/

Ex-Windows user (Win. 98, XP, 7); since mid-2017 using also macOS. Presently on Monterey 12.15 & sometimes running also Linux (Mint).

MacBook Pro circa mid-2015, 15" display, with 16GB 1600 GHz DDR3 RAM, 1 TB SSD, a Haswell architecture Intel CPU with 4 Cores and 8 Threads model i7-4870HQ @ 2.50GHz.
Intel Iris Pro GPU with Built-in Bus, VRAM 1.5 GB, Display 2880 x 1800 Retina, 24-Bit color.
macOS Monterey; browsers: Waterfox "Current", Vivaldi and (now and then) Chrome; security apps. Intego AV

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[rc primak]

I posted much the same thing about the third party antivirus issue that I am about to post about this issue:

In spite of being Microsoft branded, the dGPUs are NVidia products with NVidia drivers. (Although, these drivers may be Microsoft branded.)

As a graphics card manufacturer, NVidia has a long history of making proprietary drivers with specialized capabilities. This is a strength and a weakness. These proprietary NVidia drivers are notoriously fragile. Any change in a Graphics Stack will break them and cause issues. Microsoft Windows and their Surface devices are by no means the only instance of such fragility in NVidia drivers.

Every OS NVidia runs on has had similar issues. Linux has had plenty. MacOs has had some. And Windows has a long history before Windows 10 of updates and upgrades borking NVidia drivers, or failing to install due to issues with NVidia drivers.

This is nothing new, and it is not Microsoft’s fault. NVidia’s driver writers (outsourced last I knew to somewhere on Taiwan) have no respect for the requirements of or changes in graphics stacks. None whatsoever. It’s almost as if they live and work in a vacuum.

 

-- rc primak

• This reply was modified 5 years, 10 months ago by rc primak.
• This reply was modified 5 years, 10 months ago by rc primak.
• This reply was modified 5 years, 10 months ago by rc primak.

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Great article Woody, and I very much like your style of writing . . . but . . . yeah, there’s a but.

Although it does answer the question in the title “Why can’t Microsoft reliably patch its own hardware?”, it does not really address the broader and more important question of why are the failings so common? What is/are the cause/causes of all the bugs and errors?

I was expecting an article that did not refer to just one incidence.

So I guess my “but” is suggesting this as a topic for your fine mind 🙂 As a user of personal computers, in terms of operating systems, my history is CPM, CPM86, Concurrent DOS, MS-DOS, Linux (Mint and Ubuntu) and the entire dysfunctional family called Windows.

As far as I can tell, the Linux family’s patches and updates do not suffer whatever hereditary problem is the cause of all these maddening and frequent WU failings.

Keep doing what you are doing, you are an essential source of important information, applicable to so many people world wide. I salute you.

Best wishes,

Patrick Ellen, Thailand.

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