Can W10 auto-update an UEFI?

Have a Samsung Series5 ultrabook (530U4C S04) and i finally managed to
properly install Windows 10 on it.
It previously had W7 and hopefully i did everything right.
First i looked in Samsung to see if there was an update for the UEFI,
there was a little program (only for Windows 7) that told me there was a
new UEFI and it apparantly flashed it correctly. Then i created a
bootable media with GPT partition scheme, and installed Windows10 from
scratch.

Everything works fine so far and i also installed the samsung control
thing that allows for the Fn key to push volume up/down, display
brightness etc.


The only question now is: what happens if Samsung updates the UEFI again?
Is there a policy in Windows10 that allows Windows to update the UEFI by
itself without the user really noticing it? It's mainly a question of
curiosity because the little uefi update tool will not work in W10.

greetings from Vienna.

Roland Schweiger

In article
Roland Schweiger wrote:

Have a Samsung Series5 ultrabook (530U4C S04) and i finally managed to
properly install Windows 10 on it.
It previously had W7 and hopefully i did everything right.
First i looked in Samsung to see if there was an update for the UEFI,
there was a little program (only for Windows 7) that told me there was a
new UEFI and it apparantly flashed it correctly. Then i created a
bootable media with GPT partition scheme, and installed Windows10 from
scratch.

Everything works fine so far and i also installed the samsung control
thing that allows for the Fn key to push volume up/down, display
brightness etc.


The only question now is: what happens if Samsung updates the UEFI again?
Is there a policy in Windows10 that allows Windows to update the UEFI by
itself without the user really noticing it? It's mainly a question of
curiosity because the little uefi update tool will not work in W10.


There are ni UEFI updates. These are firmware updates. UEFI may be
part of that. You should never take a firmware update unless it
solves a problem you have. Properly done, firmwre updates will not
affect your OS. Improperly done, your OS will never be seen by your
hardware.

Windows will never update your firmware.

Am 07.12.2016 um 15:21 schrieb Nomen Nescio:

There are no UEFI updates. These are firmware updates. UEFI may be
part of that. You should never take a firmware update unless it
solves a problem you have. Properly done, firmwre updates will not
affect your OS. Improperly done, your OS will never be seen by your
hardware.

Windows will never update your firmware.


Yes true. I ment the firmware (actually in previous days also
unprecicely termed BIOS even by the manufacturers themselves) and the
Notebook / ultrabook is from round about 2012 and at that time (in end
consumer segment) the "transition" from BIOS --- UEFI was relatively
new and i had numerous problems with it as i tried to install Windows 8
at that time bun in the EventViewer it gave me several HAL (hardware
abstraction layer) problems so i reverted to Win7.
So now before attempting to install Windows10, i did look for a firmware
update (with UEFI and its fixes being part of it) and samsung did offer
one in 2015. So i flashed that *before* installing W10 and now W10 does
run problem-free on the machine so als you state correctly, if no other
problems occur, i should not bother with any further firmware updates.

greetings

Roland Schweiger

Hi, Roland.

You can read more about how Win10 handles device and firmware updates he

https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/win...pdate-platform


--
....winston
msft mvp

Am 07.12.2016 um 20:34 schrieb ...winston:


Hello Winston!


https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/win...pdate-platform


Thanks for the info. For now i quickly read through it and if i
understood correctly, there is a mechanism (mainly UpdateCapsule and
QueryCapsuleCapabilities) that allows OEMs (and other producers) to
somehow place their update needs inside the UEFI so that it can under
some circumstances be updatet, without a typical end-user noticing it,
thinking it might be part of a regular Windows update. I was wondering
about such specifications because in my particular case Samsung no
longer offers any kind of tool to update the firmware. Very interesting.
And indeed (i can only judge from the few machines i had in my hands)
especially a few years ago there were some problems with the
implementation of UEFI even with hardware i/o to the HDDs, SSDs etc. The
particular ultrabook i am setting up right now is finally working fine
with UEFI (the machine is from round about 2012 and aparantly last
firmware from 2015) and in the event viewer there are no more red dots
claiming something with HAL problems...


greetings

Roland Schweiger

On 12/7/2016 3:10 AM, Roland Schweiger wrote:
Have a Samsung Series5 ultrabook (530U4C S04) and i finally managed to
properly install Windows 10 on it.
It previously had W7 and hopefully i did everything right.
First i looked in Samsung to see if there was an update for the UEFI,
there was a little program (only for Windows 7) that told me there was a
new UEFI and it apparantly flashed it correctly. Then i created a
bootable media with GPT partition scheme, and installed Windows10 from
scratch.

Everything works fine so far and i also installed the samsung control
thing that allows for the Fn key to push volume up/down, display
brightness etc.


The only question now is: what happens if Samsung updates the UEFI again?
Is there a policy in Windows10 that allows Windows to update the UEFI by
itself without the user really noticing it? It's mainly a question of
curiosity because the little uefi update tool will not work in W10.

greetings from Vienna.

Roland Schweiger
UEFI scares me.
I bought two different Gateway UEFI systems without hard drives.
They would boot into the whateveryoucallauefibios.
They were locked so that they could only install windows in UEFI mode.
I attempted to install windows 8.1, which was the originally installed
system. Windows installed and seemed to run just fine.
I rebooted and NOTHING. No boot splash screen, no disk spinup
no flashing lights, no nothing. The CPU fan spins up for a few
seconds and that's it.
I googled and messed with it for
a week. Never got anything to run again.

Roland Schweiger wrote:

Have a Samsung Series5 ultrabook (530U4C S04) and i finally managed to
properly install Windows 10 on it.
It previously had W7 and hopefully i did everything right.

Why did you upgrade? I'm not slighting you for doing so. Just want to
know your reasons, particlularly with the risks that older hardware
presents.

I myself never upgrade an OS until such time as it no long fits my
needs. Or just fails outright. (Never had that happen.) I'm still
using XP SP3 on 4 to 10 year old hardware, and for my Windows needs,
it's still chugging along just fine.

Thanks.

Stef

Am 08.12.2016 um 17:52 schrieb Stef:

Why did you upgrade?

Suppose it was a mixture of curiosity and technical raison. As stated,
the ultrabook is from round about 2012 when manufacturers (for end
consumer segment) started using UEFI instead of BIOS. The ultrabook was
without OS so i installed W7 in the first place but had serious problems
with it as i tried to install it in UEFI mode but did not work properly,
i had to force the UEFI settings to emulate BIOS and turn off
secure-boot. W7 worked somehow fine but not totally satisfactory,
because the HDD is a hybrid 24 GB SSD + 500GB HDD and samsung provided a
mechanism they called "express cache" which did not satisfy me.
So eventually i tried Windows 8, no real luck neither and the UEFI was
buggy.
Finally there was an update to the UEFI and i decided to try Windows10.
As the ultrabook had no sensitive data on it i decided to do everything
from scratch so i set it to UEFI + secure boot and GPT partition scheme
and started from a bootable USB stick and yey, everything installed fine.
I use the SSD as a separate partition and put the pagefile.sys and swap
file there, works fine and standby, on/off, shutting and opening the lid
now work fine. On this particular hardware i am satisfied with W10.

Indeed i have elderly hardware, e.g. a desktop tower with an asus
p6t-deluxe mainboard from round about 2009 running Windows7 and i will
not upgrade this as there is no UEFI anyway and no real benefit for me
on elderly hardware. But on the described ultrabook, the upgrade finally
was fine.

greetings

Roland Scweiger

On 12/8/2016 8:52 AM, Stef wrote:
Roland Schweiger wrote:

Have a Samsung Series5 ultrabook (530U4C S04) and i finally managed to
properly install Windows 10 on it.
It previously had W7 and hopefully i did everything right.

Why did you upgrade? I'm not slighting you for doing so. Just want to
know your reasons, particlularly with the risks that older hardware
presents.

I myself never upgrade an OS until such time as it no long fits my
needs. Or just fails outright. (Never had that happen.) I'm still
using XP SP3 on 4 to 10 year old hardware, and for my Windows needs,
it's still chugging along just fine.

That's an excellent strategy, but stuff does change.
And vendors drop support for older operating systems.
I had to upgrade from XP to Vista to get media center support.
(XP media center isn't readily available.)
Then had to upgrade to win7 because Vista would only let me have two
TV tuners.
If not for mediacenter, I'd have upgraded to linux.

Sometimes, you upgrade just because you can do it for free...Win10.
Better to get the free digital entitlement and switch back to 7 than
to pay for win10 later when you actually need it You WILL eventually
need win10...maybe not this year...or next...but eventually.
I had the windows 7 license/disk 4 years before I installed it.
Thanks.

Stef

Am 07.12.2016 um 12:10 schrieb Roland Schweiger:
Have a Samsung Series5 ultrabook (530U4C S04) and i finally managed to
properly install Windows 10 on it.


Slightly OT but the only little stupid thing i can' t get rid of is the
fact: When on battery power and the screen goes OFF, the HDD also tries
to go OFF, but then spins up again because the system does something,
then spins down and up and down and up and down ... stupid and would in
the end ruin the HDD.
In the energy savin thing plan (in my german version called
"Energiesparplan") i set the "balanced" plan and set HDD to NEVER go
out, neither when plugged in nor on battery power. But after a few
minutes of idle (idle meaning not touching keyboard/mouse) the HDD
starts spinning down and up and down ...
Suppose the UEFI does this somehow on it's own, has anyone an idea how
to prevent the HDD from doing this?

greetings

Roland Schweiger

mike wrote:

On 12/8/2016 8:52 AM, Stef wrote:
Roland Schweiger wrote:

Have a Samsung Series5 ultrabook (530U4C S04) and i finally managed to
properly install Windows 10 on it.
It previously had W7 and hopefully i did everything right.

Why did you upgrade? I'm not slighting you for doing so. Just want to
know your reasons, particlularly with the risks that older hardware
presents.

I myself never upgrade an OS until such time as it no long fits my
needs. Or just fails outright. (Never had that happen.) I'm still
using XP SP3 on 4 to 10 year old hardware, and for my Windows needs,
it's still chugging along just fine.

That's an excellent strategy, but stuff does change.

Thats more of a problem for Windows -- New OS on old
hardware or new hardware-old OS. (Sometimes, I think Microsoft
purposefully "obsoletes" to force users to buy new stuff.) For
example, Linux has been my primary OS for 15+ years (before that, the
Amiga), and this system which I built 10 years ago this month, and
upgraded many times over the years -- 3 new CPUs, new motherboard 7.5
years ago, 4 graphic cards, 4 monitors, 3 keyboards, new hard drives,
all mix-n-match, etc -- has had 4 different versions of Linux on it.
Never had any issues. Just plugged in the new hardware, and booted
up. Oh, there was one glitch. When I installed the new motherboard,
the OS changed the name of the onboard ethernet port from eth0 to
eth1, but it still worked. I dread to think the problems I would have
had if I had done all that with Windows. Come to think of it, I have.
That's why the thought is so dreadful. ;-)

And vendors drop support for older operating systems.

Only Windows. I think MS forces them to, to force you to buy a new OS
or system or both. Microsoft is insidious. ;-)

I had to upgrade from XP to Vista to get media center support.
(XP media center isn't readily available.)
Then had to upgrade to win7 because Vista would only let me have two
TV tuners.
If not for mediacenter, I'd have upgraded to linux.

One of the many reasons Windows isn't my primary OS.

Sometimes, you upgrade just because you can do it for free...Win10.
Better to get the free digital entitlement and switch back to 7 than
to pay for win10 later when you actually need it You WILL eventually
need win10...maybe not this year...or next...but eventually.
I had the windows 7 license/disk 4 years before I installed it.

"Free" is not necessarily a bargain as so many W10 users are
discovering. FWIW, I think MS rushed the release of W10. It wasn't
ready. Needed another year of development and bug fixing. But
then there was that W8 debacle.

Stef

Roland Schweiger wrote:

Am 08.12.2016 um 17:52 schrieb Stef:

Why did you upgrade?

Suppose it was a mixture of curiosity and technical raison. As stated,
the ultrabook is from round about 2012 when manufacturers (for end
consumer segment) started using UEFI instead of BIOS. The ultrabook was
without OS so i installed W7 in the first place but had serious problems
with it as i tried to install it in UEFI mode but did not work properly,
i had to force the UEFI settings to emulate BIOS and turn off
secure-boot. W7 worked somehow fine but not totally satisfactory,
because the HDD is a hybrid 24 GB SSD + 500GB HDD and samsung provided a
mechanism they called "express cache" which did not satisfy me.
So eventually i tried Windows 8, no real luck neither and the UEFI was
buggy.
Finally there was an update to the UEFI and i decided to try Windows10.
As the ultrabook had no sensitive data on it i decided to do everything
from scratch so i set it to UEFI + secure boot and GPT partition scheme
and started from a bootable USB stick and yey, everything installed fine.
I use the SSD as a separate partition and put the pagefile.sys and swap
file there, works fine and standby, on/off, shutting and opening the lid
now work fine. On this particular hardware i am satisfied with W10.

Nice to come across someone who upgrades for reasons other than It's
new.

Thanks for taking the time to answer my query.

Stef

On Fri, 9 Dec 2016 17:45:59 +0000 (UTC), Stef
wrote:

"Free" is not necessarily a bargain as so many W10 users are
discovering.

I used to point out the same thing, but for many people it's a losing
battle when you're fighting the human impulse to go with "shiny and
new". I sort of get it, but not really. For me, W10 has to make itself
known as 'better than W7' in ways that matter to me, and so far it
hasn't.

FWIW, I think MS rushed the release of W10. It wasn't
ready. Needed another year of development and bug fixing. But
then there was that W8 debacle.

Agreed, but from the MS perspective, how better to spend that year of
dev and bug fixing than to put the product into the hands of as many
unsuspecting consumers as possible? I think the masses have reached the
point where they no longer care about anything except Facebook likes, so
MS can pretty much do what they want.

Am 09.12.2016 um 18:57 schrieb Stef:

Nice to come across someone who upgrades for reasons other than It's
new.

Thanks for taking the time to answer my query.

Welcome. From the experience i now have, i would recommend W10 on almost
any newer hardware especially if it is with UEFI. There aparantly have
been some substancial changes in the kernel and HDD i/o especially does
seem to be smoother, even smoother than in W7. Yet compatibility still
is not 100% everywhere, e.g. i use Mozilla Thunderbird that also works
fine in W10 but for some reason whatever it takes at least 15 seconds to
start up (and after that it works fast and fine) i can live with that
but it seems to be waiting for something. Where as other programs (e.g.
MS Word or the web browsers) boot up fast and work fast, also the
graphics card (a combination of Intel HD4000 + GeForce) work fine and
the ultrabook is stable finally which satisfies me the most.

On elderly hardware (i have a desktop tower with Asus mainboard from
2009) i don't really feel the need to upgrade right now. It has no UEFI
and it has much sensitive data on it, i do not think this relatively old
hardware would benefit from W10.
So it all is a matter of the exact situation.

However, finally and in the long term there's no way around W10 and i'd
say most of it works pretty well.

greetings

Roland Schweiger

On 12/9/2016 11:22 AM, Char Jackson wrote:
On Fri, 9 Dec 2016 17:45:59 +0000 (UTC), Stef
wrote:

"Free" is not necessarily a bargain as so many W10 users are
discovering.

I used to point out the same thing, but for many people it's a losing
battle when you're fighting the human impulse to go with "shiny and
new". I sort of get it, but not really. For me, W10 has to make itself
known as 'better than W7' in ways that matter to me, and so far it
hasn't.
I'd agree for now.
BUT, you'll eventually have to upgrade to Win10. Getting the free
digital entitlement costs a few hours of your life. You don't have
to use it if you don't want. Last count, I had 18 computers entitled
to use win10...but only two test machines actually doing so.

For me, messing with Win10 fulfills my need for more frustration
and has almost completely displaced desktop linux in that role.
Win10 is becoming more likable, so I expect I'll have to go find
the linux disk again.

FWIW, I think MS rushed the release of W10. It wasn't
ready. Needed another year of development and bug fixing. But
then there was that W8 debacle.

Agreed, but from the MS perspective, how better to spend that year of
dev and bug fixing than to put the product into the hands of as many
unsuspecting consumers as possible? I think the masses have reached the
point where they no longer care about anything except Facebook likes, so
MS can pretty much do what they want.

I think the rush was a hail mary to save the windows mobile effort.