Windows 7 links getting harder to use – DirectX edition

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From reader MS: Just noticed something on Microsoft’s pages. I’m trying to find the DirectX downloader for a co-worker having trouble with his at-home
[See the full post at: Windows 7 links getting harder to use – DirectX edition]

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“Call me cynical, but is this the next push on the Windows 10 front, making everything related to Windows 7 or 8.1 harder and harder to find?”

If that should be the case then I don’t doubt that there’ll be a host of reliable independent sites offering easily accessible downloads much as they do now with graphics drivers etc.

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Oh for the days when games came on CD’s and included the required version of Direct X.

I think you’re justified in being cynical.

Being 20 something in the 70's was so much better than being 70 something in the insane 20's

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@woody: Here is the link to the DirectX June 2010 Redistributable (offline) installer [file size 95.6Mb]:
https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?id=8109

And here is the proper MS link to the DirectX web installer [file size 286Kb]:
https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx%3Fid%3D35

I’m just the kind of guy that loves providing solutions.

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Thanks!

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CDs? Don’t you mean cassettes:)?

Excuse me while I go and adjust the autoexec.bat and config.sys files so the game will run! Ah for the halcyon days of DOS…

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Don’t forget HOSTS

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Easy to download? Web installers that stop working later or download something else later so and offline install or controlled test are impossible.

How else are they going to get you to install spy/ad/junkware from the now evil download.com aka cnet.com (owned by CBS)?

There is valuable ad revenue to be had from a sleep deprived user clicking on any link they think is the right one after the official site is missing official links. (they might make 11 – 80 cents, and totaly mess up your computer)

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But would you trust getting a DirectX installer from a non-Microsoft site?

Please, tell me one “reliable independent” site that has software archives that you don’t have to run through a dozen malware/adware scanners before you feel safe to install them.

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Hi EP,

I eventually found the 2010 Redistributable installer, but will that give him the required version of DirectX to play the latest Star Wars game? The reason I got involved with this was that the user in question installed the AMD drivers recommended by Microsoft via Windows Update, which broke the game in the first place.

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I have not had to deal with this particular issue (of the DirectX downloader),
but in a *general* sense, in the last 12 months, regarding my Windows 7 computer and Microsoft resources, I have found a number of broken links and removed help pages / removed fixes. Sometimes one is redirected to a nonsensical, unrelated page, and sometimes one is just presented with page-not-found. It’s very frustrating.
Some of the things I was looking up were pretty important for getting my computer to work correctly / for solving problems I had mistakenly run into.
MS is obviously competent enough and well-resourced enough not to do this / not to allow it to happen unless it’s okay with them and suits their purposes.

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The only time I ever used Cassettes (with tape) in conjunction with a computer was with my Commodore 64. Floppy discs of the 5-1/4″ and 3-1/2″ versions were used with DOS up to and including earlier versions of Windows like 98 and ME. After Win 95 there was not much need to use autoexec.bat except if a REALLY OLD DOS game needed it. So much for the history lesson.

Being 20 something in the 70's was so much better than being 70 something in the insane 20's

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This is not the “Next Push”… Microsoft has been doing exactly that kind of nonsense for many years now.

Opera Software (back in the day, the original team) once got so frustrated with how Microsoft had a penchant for intentionally serving broken CSS whenever they saw an Opera user browsing its pages – that they built a special version of Opera called the “Swedish Chef Edition”.

Whenever you browsed a page on one of Microsoft’s domains, it translated everything into “Swedish Chef dialect”. ROFL

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