> It is nice to be able to click
replyYou said click. This happens without clicking anything.
For audio interfaces, HDAudio lets you do most of this. What the extra software gives you instead is often some crappy DSP that increases latency and messes with sound quality.
replyFor years, Dell's / Realtek's software had an unpaged memory leak somewhere. If you were using a screen reader (I guess they must interact with audio devices in some very specific way that Realtek hasn't accounted for), your system would eventually run out of RAM and BSOD. They didn't fix this until Microsoft and a few screen reader vendors intervened. "Don't buy Dell" was a standard recommendation in the blind community for years, which didn't help if you had a work PC with no local admin.
Oh definitely, it's more a question of why Microsoft allows any 'driver utility' to have internet access or do anything outside of just configuring the hardware.
reply> why Microsoft allows any 'driver utility' to have internet access
replyFirmware updates for devices are not a thing in your world?
It seems like windows update should handle distributing the verified new firmware file if it is also distributing the driver utility to avoid any issues like this post talks about.
replyThat would be a good idea actually, but I'm not sure how viable that is within the current Windows Update instrumentation. Allowing local binaries to fetch random URLs through the Windows Update API is no different from them using the HTTP Service unless there's some kind of whitelisting/validation happening there. The alternative would be that Microsoft uses their own Windows Update cdn to host random firmware files that they're not able to verify themselves. Both cases sound like maintenance overhead for Microsoft without benefit to them.
replyThere is no reason we need a badly coded vendor control panel to install firmware upgrades though. On Linux https://fwupd.org/ is a database for vendor firmware, and you use one shared open source took to install upgrades for all devices attached to your system.
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replyIf there is a system where someone smashes through your wall to deliver you some food, and we ask "why do we even have this guy-smashes-through-wall system?", "So we can have dinner" does not answer that question.
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