Pages

Friday, December 30, 2011

Windows Updates: "Acer - Display - ACER S271HL"? I have a Dell…

After seeing this II did an internet search and found this:

I've just checked if there were any Windows updates out there for my
setup and noticed an optional one for "Acer - Display - ACER S271HL," even though I don't have any Acer hardware. So I wonder why such updates show up for me. I thought Windows Update was smart enough to pick only applicable updates for a given setup. Was I wrong?

In fact, Windows Update isn't "always smart enough". Never take irrelevant updates if they are offered. If you need advice, post a question in the newsgroup appropriate for the OS you're using.

There was one case, where an update like that, affected the ability
to input using the keyboard of the computer. Which makes the computer difficult to fix. And that update was offered to *everyone* at the time. It was only by one person being affected, and warning others,
that other people were protected from peril. Eventually, about a day later, Microsoft removed that item from Windows Update.

But if everyone had blindly taken that optional update, there would have been a lot of computers to repair. That one was a HID (human interface) driver, a filter driver for touchpad, and for some reason, Windows Update concluded every computer needed a copy.

Security updates are relatively safe. They have a pretty good track
record. But optional hardware driver updates, do not have a good record.
Paul

3 comments:

  1. What the CRAP is all that TEA PARTY and HypoChristian misinformation scattered ALL OVER this post?

    ReplyDelete
  2. Oh Yah... Other than the odd ads, Regarding the ACER Display Driver, it has to do with the fact that you MAY be using an HDTV as a monitor. I have a Hitatchi 40" HDTV I'm sending a composite video out to, on an Nvidia GeForce card of some sort, the other display device, is a 21" Sun CRT... Which I used to think was huge. So my main output goes to tyhe little CRT Monitor and I have it set up so that any Video Output gets displayed on the HDTV monitor at 1920x1080i

    ReplyDelete
  3. It's a week later, and I'm still being offered that update... on a VMWare VM and a Lenovo laptop. :(

    ReplyDelete