why does a hardware not install its drivers by itself like mouse or portable hdds? is it too hard for the hardware makers to include drivers for pc os'es in their products instead of making people waste their time?
That's not how hardware works anon
>>55132352
The mouse and the hdd are not the one installing drivers, Windows is installing generic drivers for them.
When a Windows version is made by MS it includes many basic drivers according to hardware prevalent at that times. So MANY generic drivers are included.
Like win10 already has usb3 driver built in unlike win7.
Some drivers are simple to include in windows and some are not like gpu.
So a windows released in 2007 will not have device driver of hardware made later initially if the hardware does not use a generic driver.
Also windows cannot include all drivers in a install media due to impracticable results.
>>55133337
>>55133004
point taken but would it really be so hard for hardware makers and ms to cooperate so that new hardware contains a specific id that tells ms update exactly where to look on the web to automagically download drivers, instead of either having to do it manually or rely on generic drivers?
>>55133383
This specific id already exists, and is called hardware Id, you can check it with lspci on Linux, and in some way on Windows.
Windows 10 probably uses that to install drivers.
>>55133383
That specific id is already on the hardware (and has been since many years). It is called hardware id and vendor id .
It is already used by microsoft to provide device drivers through windows update since xp days.
The procedure is this:
User clicks on windows update>windows sends hid and vid of unknown devices in device manager to Microsoft > Microsoft searches for corresponding driver in THEIR own database> matched driver is downloaded.
Now the problem is , to provide driver through windows update the manufacturer has to submit the driver to Microsoft for certification (called WHQL). Now big manufacturers are okay with this but its apparently too much work for smaller vendors. The certification also takes time.
So what happens is that either the driver on windows update is outdated or the updated driver is not on windows update. So driver cannot be installed by windows update but has to be installed manually.
Also generic drivers are not inherently bad. They are perfect for simple devices like keyboard, mouse hdd, monitor etc
