Windows 10: why is a driver re-install ever necessary ?

Blue Bubble said:
But management has already spent money on a support contract, and is expecting something for that. And once the cause of the problem gets found, a proper fix can be made, and the problem occurs no more.
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So it's the responsibility of a tech support company to troubleshoot and then recode a 3rd party keyboard driver? I don't think there's a funnier joke than that. Why? If the end user isn't combative, or bothering the tech with stories of how once up a time IT would do more, it's a 3 minute fix (that includes writing up the ticket).

Wudang said:
You windows only guys are used to this. To those of us used to very different OSs like say VMS, MVS, etc it seems suboptimal.
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Cause if there's one thing we know, it's that there's nothing suboptimal about those OS's. The learning curve alone, to teach an entire enterprise staff, would be "suboptimal" in the absolute kindest of terms.

I'm not a "windows only guy" but the majority of end users in almost every single company world wide are windows only people. Supporting them is my job. Most people that use the OS's you're referring to can fix their own ****.
 
smartcooky said:
We had a similar problem at work with a Ubiquity Wi-Fi. It is absolutely necessary for us to have to have a perfectly functioning Wi-Fi because our customers need to be able to connect to it "in-shop" to upload files for printing. The problem we had was it would suddenly be unable to take a connection every couple of days (it wasn't running out of leases, I looked at that), but a reboot would always fix it for the next couple of days. In the end, I put it on a mains power timer that turned it off for a minute and then back on again at 8am every day. Haven't had a connection problem since, and that was a couple of years ago.
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What are you using to update the Unifi AP? If you want to resolve this issue I think it wouldn't be too bad. It sounds like it's got a bad configuration or the firmware is outdated. You can setup a unifi controller for free. All you need is a linux\windows box (VM, whatever) and a few minutes to configure it. I would be more than happy to walk you through it.

Just like with other devices regular security updates, and the like are extremely important. If you don't have an onsite controller I would strongly suggest setting one up. It's great to have for so many things, and really only needs to be turn on when you want to change a config, or update something.
 
Wudang said:
Yes BB how dare you come in here flaunting your credentials like that! ;)

I'd be very interested to know who's right about whether the windows drivers allows a cascade down to the bios keyboard handler.
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In the Computer Management console ( W10 ) there is no option to disable/enable the keyboard driver. That is understandable..
You can uninstall it but I'm sure it would take a reboot, in which case it would be re-installed.

The driver is dated 2006.

I don't see that driver needing any changes. The keyboard processor tells the system what keys are being pressed.
 
Blue Bubble said:
I think these are brush-off excuses for "we haven't got a clue why the problem occurred".
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Unfortunately, yes. As others have said, it is rarely cost-effective to do root cause analysis for every little problem. There are currently 238 incidents in my team's queue. There's no way we're going to do RCA for all of them.

Blue Bubble said:
That would have been the same in my world, but management would have expected root-cause analysis every single time. Correctly so too !
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Old man shouts at clouds, I'm afraid. The IT landscape has changed drastically, even in just the last five years, let alone the last twenty-five, which is when my career in IT started. Let me tell you a story. Settle in.

In my first IT job, in 1995, I was presented with a problem where Word would crash while spooling a document. That version of Word was slow enough that you could see each page spool in the status bar, so I knew on what page it crashed. I copied the top half that page into a new document, which printed without crashing. I copied the bottom half. Crash. I copied half of that half into another new document. Crash. By steadily narrowing down the bits that crashed, I was able to zoom in on a single letter - a lower case a. I went back to the original document, deleted and retyped that a, and the whole document spooled and printed without crashing.

My point in telling this story is twofold. My first is that I am bored and need a few minutes' distraction from those 238 incidents. The second is that I would never do that today. Especially since I found the magic incantation Ctrl-A Ctrl-C Ctrl-N Ctrl-V.

Blue Bubble said:
And no, bit-rot is not really an explanation.
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It really is. With the billions of bits that make up a modern operating system, no-one can keep track of the myriad of ways that they can interact. All sorts of things can flip a bit and suddenly make something unusable. Windows is pretty robust but no operating system is immune to bit rot.

Skeptical Greg said:
In all my years in PC repair and support I don't recall ever fixing a problem, keyboard or otherwise, by reinstalling a keyboard driver.
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We had a problem with the onboard cameras in some of our Dells where we fixed it by reinstalling the camera driver. Delete it in Device Manager, reboot, it would be reinstalled by the group policy. Problem fixed. Don't care why it failed.
 
Blue Bubble said:
So, my civil partner has a new part-time temp job, where she's using a Dell Ultrabook laptop running Windows 10. Yesterday (the third day on the job), starting the system looked completely normal (which also includes the keyboard lights switching on). However, the keyboard was completely non-functional, so it was not possible to enter a username/password (using the On-Screen Keyboard obviously did work).

She engaged IT support, who then did a re-install of the keyboard driver (the keyboard was thereafter functional as normal).

I am a retired IT consultant with a BSc in Computer Science, so not a complete newbie ;)

Could someone with more Windows knowledge/experience than I have please explain to me why a driver re-install was necessary ? What happened to it to cause it to break so that it needed to be re-installed ? It's not as if it's a dynamically changing piece of software ... it's not been updated in many years, as one would expect of a pretty fundamental and relatively simple part of the operating system.

Why do users accept this as a "solution" to a problem ? In my working days in support (VMS and Tru64), I'd never have got away with blithely re-installing a driver for any particular device without actually explaining what had gone wrong to cause a problem. And no, bit-rot is not really an explanation.


Windows ... grrrrrr :mad:
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Windows 10 is much more complex that VMS or Tru64 were. It also operates on vastly more devices and lets maufacturers to their own system code into it to run as drivers.


Support staff have a list of things to do if a user says something is not working. One of them could be 'reinstall the driver'.
 
a_unique_person said:
Support staff have a list of things to do if a user says something is not working. One of them could be 'reinstall the driver'.
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In fact if the thing that is not working is something that is known to have a third-party driver, it may well be pretty high up on our list.
 
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Blue Bubble said:
But management has already spent money on a support contract, and is expecting something for that. And once the cause of the problem gets found, a proper fix.
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They hate spending that money and the KPIs they measure value on are the intertwined user satisfaction and time to resolution. Tightly resourced frontline support fapping around on root cause when there is a 5 minute fix available is counter productive.

Finding root cause can drive such KPIs if problems are widespread. Recognising those trends in an organisation is the responsibility of support managers and specialist leads. They then work on root causes often with the vendor to push out fixes.
 
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Yeah I had my old timer head on from my IBM days. In <big bank> the whole ITIL Service Management ran on KPIs and screw the users or anything else. The worst example was the workflow system. Everything had to be a separate work item from the start. They couldn't start with a request like "please add new users jsmith15, jdoe99, mhunt2 to AD group pencilpushers" and then split to separate work items.
So yeah, the service desk would get a user having keyboard problems IR raised, farmed out to IT support who remote in, fix, close IR. KPIs met and managers rejoice. I saw almost no trace of the proactive element of Problem Management. For a coupld of years I was in a cross skills team covering live incidents to get some embarassing metrics down (being late with BACS is a Bad Thing writ large) and we did some and solved some problems that had existed for many years but apart from that nope. Everyone too busy.

"Here is Edward Bear, coming downstairs now, bump, bump, bump, on the back of his head, behind Christopher Robin. It is, as far as he knows, the only way of coming downstairs, but sometimes he feels that there really is another way, if only he could stop bumping for a moment and think of it. And then he feels that perhaps there isn't." ― A.A. Milne, Winnie-the-Pooh.
 
Blue Bubble said:
But management has already spent money on a support contract, and is expecting something for that.
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Management is welcome to take it up with the vendor, but I bet the following considerations will prevail:

- Their support contract calls for reasonable effort from the vendor, not all possible effort.

- The support contract is not a suicide pact for the vendor.

- The product and the support contract are priced to cover the costs of a reasonably functional product, not the cost of a product that runs perfectly and where every single issue is exhaustively investigated for root cause.

- Management's time is far too valuable to start a slapfight with the vendor over a minor issue with an easy and well-known workaround.
 
Because I'm nosy I've been looking at support contracts that my organisation has, mainly to see if value for money is being obtained. I've sent one of these contracts to our legal department because as far as I can tell - I'm a techie, not a lawyer - it's not clear exactly what kind of support we're paying for. Or indeed if we're actually paying for any support at all.
 
Blue Bubble said:
Could someone with more Windows knowledge/experience than I have please explain to me why a driver re-install was necessary ? What happened to it to cause it to break so that it needed to be re-installed ? It's not as if it's a dynamically changing piece of software ... it's not been updated in many years, as one would expect of a pretty fundamental and relatively simple part of the operating system.
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Two possibilities come to mind.

1. Some persistent configuration got corrupted by a bug.

2. A Windows update changed something in a way that the existing driver didn't notice, but a reinstall would

Why do users accept this as a "solution" to a problem ?
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Because it fixes the problem.

In my working days in support (VMS and Tru64), I'd never have got away with blithely re-installing a driver for any particular device without actually explaining what had gone wrong to cause a problem. And no, bit-rot is not really an explanation.
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Did you actually work for Digital? If so, you would have had access to the source code and diagnostics so you do the analysis. I assume by "IT support" you mean your partner's company's IT support, not Dell or Microsoft. There's no way they could have gone beyond collecting diagnostics and raising a ticket with Dell or MS (and by the way, how do you know they didn't).

Furthermore, it is likely that the support contracts you worked on were for many thousands of dollars. You would have had the budget and time to be able to diagnose issues of this nature. The support contract for a Dell is probably priced in the hundreds of dollars so users won't get such premium service.

Also, you don't know that the issue didn't get back to Dell and you don't know they haven't fixed it and released a patch.
 
I had a problem where the some pcs of a particular model would not sleep properly on the corporate model.

If they went to sleep the disk share for the centralised file storage would disconnect. Any open files would then not save, even though the share would reactivate.

This would happen only on some pcs, and not others.

Investigating revealed the same model had had an engineering change. The more expensive Intel Lan chip had been replaced by a cheaper one made in Taiwan. That, of course, used it's own driver. The driver for that chip had the bug in it.

For reasons, the driver for that chip had never been updated to the driver that fixed that bug, even though the Intel chip had received updates.

I was able to explain to the pc user what was happening at least. No idea when the driver was going to be replaced.
 
a_unique_person said:
I had a problem where the some pcs of a particular model would not sleep properly on the corporate model.

If they went to sleep the disk share for the centralised file storage would disconnect. Any open files would then not save, even though the share would reactivate.

This would happen only on some pcs, and not others.

Investigating revealed the same model had had an engineering change. The more expensive Intel Lan chip had been replaced by a cheaper one made in Taiwan. That, of course, used it's own driver. The driver for that chip had the bug in it.

For reasons, the driver for that chip had never been updated to the driver that fixed that bug, even though the Intel chip had received updates.

I was able to explain to the pc user what was happening at least. No idea when the driver was going to be replaced.
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There was much rejoicing at a previous employer of mine when it was announced that the entire fleet of PCs was going to be replaced with x thousand completely identical laptops. No more need for IT support to struggle with a variety of different configurations, components and drivers.

That sense of well-being didn't last for very long, I can tell you.
 
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