Brian Gregory wrote:

On 13/07/2018 07:48, VanguardLH wrote:
pjp wrote:

I have an old Creative Webcam Gen3. Under XP it required a driver and
that's the last one available. Driver is very old, basically unuasable
in todays OS's.

As a curiousity I plugged it into a couple of Win7 32 bit pcs and they
all saw the camera, downloaded a driver and it was seen as a Windows
Imaging Device and it worked. Under 64 bit Win7 it can't locate a
driver!!!

Same thing happened in last 24 hours, 64 bit Windows with a bluetooth
dongle and it's go looking yourself. 32 bit downloads a driver that
appears to work properly.

Is this a common occurence?

Probably because the last driver provided by Creative (Microsoft doesn't
write the drivers, they just included them in later versions of Windows)
was a 32-bit driver. Unless Creative created a 64-bit driver, there
isn't one for Microsoft to bundle with a later version of Windows.


I think Microsoft writes some drivers but not many.

I suspect the only "drivers" that Microsoft writes are the INF files to
define classes of generic devices (i.e., their miniport drivers).

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/win...d-driver-pairs

This was the same idea as when Microsoft provided DirectX, so game
authors would have a consistent interface to which they could code
instead of each author having to design from scratch. In some cases,
all that is needed is the INF "driver", like for mass storage devices
(e.g., hard disks).

There have been problems in the past with hardware vendors doling out a
driver to Windows and then finding their driver has a flaw. I remember
when Promise (probably for a SCSI controller) pushed out a driver to
Microsoft, found it had a flaw that caused data loss, and tried to yank
it within the same week; however, they couldn't get Microsoft to pull
the driver for something like 3 months. For the corrected driver, you
had to use the newest one at Promise's site.

I've had Windows Update try to push a driver that was for a different
model within the same family of products from a vendor. For example, a
Winmodem had 3 different versions (A, B, C) for the same model and I
needed the driver for the C model, not the earlier ones. But WU wanted
to push a driver for the earlier versions. If I used the old drivers,
most of the Winmodem would work but a couple features would've been
lost. Although it was "just" a version change, the board vendor had
changed which chip was on the PCB so a new driver was required to fully
support it.

I *never* get driver updates via Windows Update. Their detection scheme
won't catch the problem with the wrong driver as mentioned above for the
Winmodem and the hardware vendor might already have a newer, improved,
or fixed version of their driver, so using an old one could result in
loss of function, or worse loss of data.