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Are you quite sure that they did NOT change the driver model?
What is likely is that the model was significantly changed from Windows 7 to Windows 10 (yes, it was), but in a transition phase, Windows 10 had some emulation of the Windows 7 model to give hardware vendors some time to come up with a true Windows 10 driver.
A transition period does not last forever. You can't expect a Windows 7 driver to work in Windows 10, 11, 12 and 13. Now that Microsoft has decided not to call future versions 11, 12 and 13, but Windows 10 updates, the situation is nevertheless the same: You cannot expect Windows 7 drivers to work forever.
Microsoft develops some drivers, but the majority are developed and maintained by hardware manufacturers. If the hardware vendor never made a Windows 10 driver, your friend is out of luck. Some vendors do provide driver updates that are not distributed through Microsoft update, but you have to download from the vendor site. You might find it, even if it wasn't installed with Windows update.
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Member 7989122 wrote: Are you quite sure that they did NOT change the driver model?
Microsoft is generally pretty vocal about making these sorts of breaking changes, especially something that would break a lot of software/hardware and could result in a lot of unhappy OEMs (not to mention anything about consumers). Have you heard anything about breaking changes to the driver model in Windows 10? I know I haven't, and I try to stay on top of these sorts of announcements from MS.
Also: I can honestly say that 99% of all drivers designed for Windows 7 that I have had to manually try to install on newer versions still work. Of course things can change over time so there's never any guarantee, but I wouldn't describe the current situation in an apocalyptic manner.
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Software isn't far behind.... Adobe lost me forever as a paying customer with Creative Suite 2 Premium (released in 2005). Microsoft releases Vista in '06. Half of CS2 doesnt work, Adobe will not patch as they are releasing CS3 in '07, and told me no upgrade path would be available and to pay for a full new version
Director of Transmogrification Services
Shinobi of Query Language
Master of Yoda Conditional
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Cornelius Henning wrote: I took their advice. I bought a Canon scanner and took a solemn oath never to buy HP again. 
[Soapbox Mode ON]
I don't think it's limited to HP, honestly. They are all planning obsolescence into their products (this is nothing new and it's not just the computer industry). I have a nice little Canon photo printer which is really simple but isn't supported by any Windows > 7. That's OK, I went on to eBay and bought a 2nd one (that was still new in the box) which sits waiting for the first one to die and I've stopped upgrading my network past Windows 7. Enough of this crap.
I don't have a problem "upgrading" a piece of equipment if it actually breaks or something (or there's a feature of the new one I just HAVE to have) but this upgrading every 2 or 3 years just to upgrade is nonsense. I got better things to do than constantly re configuring my network just so it can have the "latest and greatest" when everything works perfectly as-is.
[Soapbox Mode OFF]
-CM
If you think hiring a professional is expensive, wait until you hire an amateur! - Red Adair
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When in doubt, I always go for Windows 10 God Mode[^]. While MS keeps hiding more of the control panel from the average user, this shortcut to all of the now-hidden treasures remains.
if (Object.DividedByZero == true) { Universe.Implode(); }
Meus ratio ex fortis machina. Simplicitatis de formae ac munus. -Foothill, 2016
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Interesting! Thanks! 
Get me coffee and no one gets hurt!
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As far as I've ever been able to tell, the so-called God Mode list simply flattens the hierarchy of shortcuts you can get to through Control Panel and other applets. I'm not aware of any option in there that's not still exposed elsewhere. Do you know of any specific example?
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For me and my transition from 7 to 10, the benefit has been that since I cannot always remember where they put all the various settings (I can't find the Control Panel shortcut sometimes), it was better just to have the God Mode shortcut right there on the Desktop. Not that it's better, it's a little more convenient for me at least.
if (Object.DividedByZero == true) { Universe.Implode(); }
Meus ratio ex fortis machina. Simplicitatis de formae ac munus. -Foothill, 2016
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Fair point. I despise the fact that I'm wasting so much time still trying to find out where they've moved something I had memorized. And you're right about using the Find function - sometimes it'll manage to find Control Panel just by typing in "control" from the Start menu, at other times it'll return empty and offer to search the web instead. Like...wow.
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Yep. A buddy of mine brought his (Only 5 years old! he said) hp dv7 laptop in with the screen doing nothing but strobing black to bright blue to black to bright blue. I looked on hps site and saw that they offer no display driver for anything later than windows 7 x64 for this laptop and neither does intel. So we removed the drivers causing windows 10 1709 to revert to Basic Windows Display driver, which for all intent and purposes looked good at 1300 x 900. Off he went happy.
I expect to see more of this in the near future.
This is no doubt an attempt to bolster new pc sales which are flat out on the mat these days.
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Quote: This is no doubt an attempt to bolster new pc sales
And most probably also an attempt to lower costs incurred to support their own products. But in doing so, they are losing what could have been loyal long term customers.
Get me coffee and no one gets hurt!
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If that's their approach, I suspect a lot of people will simply revert back to an older OS, if that's an option to them, and keep using it until the hardware dies. Then they'll purchase something that was sold with Windows 10 already on it (so it damned well better be compatible).
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dandy72 wrote: Then they'll purchase something that was sold with Windows 10 already on it (so it damned well better be compatible)
It'll be compatible, but for how long? My Lenovo laptop was abandoned by the manufacture when windows 8.1 came out -- I bought it new the year before, when 8.0 and the laptop model were both brand spanking new. They decided it was too much trouble to write 8.1 drivers for it, so abandoned it. Make no assumptions about longevity of hardware and OS compatibility.
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Wow.
Luckily (?) I hardly ever buy laptops. I still buy/build my own PCs (of desktop variety) from parts, which tend to have more mainstream drivers than OEMs, who generally have their own and who have no incentive to keep supporting them across multiple OS versions.
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Years ago, I had an even worse case:
This was before S/PDIF inputs on the mainboard was common, so I had an external box for S/PDIF-to-USB conversion. After a couple years, the vendor announced that they would be closing down hardware development to become a specialist in writing drivers for other harware manunfacturers.
So they became driver specialists - abandoning their own hardware. They stopped maintaining the drivers for it. Thiw was when XP came onto the scene, and they wrote lots of XP drivers for others, but not for their own, like the box with their label on that I was using. When I switched to XP, I had to find another way to input S/PDIF signals.
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The problem seems to be augmented by the fact it is a ATI/AMD Graphics card. Recently tried to recycle a old laptop with a X1200 and same resolution...
- Win 10 had the same issues as yours.
- No Linux distibution I tried picked it up correctly.
- End up with win 7 and a day updating.
Paulo Gomes
Measuring programming progress by lines of code is like measuring aircraft building progress by weight.
—Bill Gates
Everything should be made as simple as possible, but not simpler.
—Albert Einstein
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Personally, I've abandoned ATI years ago. Which means nowadays I'll go out of my way to avoid anything from AMD. To me, their drivers and associated bloatware has been their downfall.
Nvidia isn't doing much better with their 300+MB driver downloads, but at least you can be a little more selective about what you install. Although AMD might have remedied the situation in the last few years--I don't know and frankly I don't care enough about them to find out.
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I had the same problem with a desktop PC last Sunday.
The PC was already equipped with a working W10 installation, just after the install of the "fall creators update" the video resolution dropped from 1600*900 to 1024*768.
Solution was:
- uninstalling the video card from the device manager (marking the "delete software driver" option)
- download and reinstall the official sw from the video card manufacturer's site
Same problem occurred on my personal home PC, after the "falling" update, my Sound Blaster audio card stopped working 
I suppose the new W10 update is messing around with drivers in general..
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My Windows 10 PC, happily running at 1920 x 1080, suddenly went blank, then came back at 1024 x 768 recently, also with a Radeon card. Device Manager claimed the driver was the latest available, but the date gave away what had happened. Probing about in the device manager page, I found it allowed me to revert to the previous driver and even allowed me to say why. It lasted until The addition of a second monitor a couple of weeks later prompted an upgrade, but the 7 year old Radeon was coping fine otherwise, after the driver "downgrade".
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I went though those motions. Deleted from Device Manager, downloaded and installed the latest from the manufacturer's own site--the last update to it was in 2009 (!)...Even though the driver installer didn't report any failure, and it was identified again in Device Manager using the correct name, the resolution selection screen still identified it as Basic Display.
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Did you had any previous manufacturer's software version? Like the ATI Catalyst CC for AMD Video Cards, or NVidia's CPanel.
If so, try uninstalling them before installing the latest sw from the official site.
That did the trick for me on a HD radeon 6500
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Other than the driver itself, no, there was no additional software. As old as Catalyst now seems to be, this laptop (and the driver--from ATI) predates it.
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Before nuking the OS next time, I'd suggest trying a driver download directly from AMD first.
The windows GPU driver installer has issues around fringe cases, and is especially eager to break stuff in service pack updates. I wouldn't be surprised if it attempted to install the current "universal" AMD driver; despite that driver no longer working for your buddy's ancient GPU.
Did you ever see history portrayed as an old man with a wise brow and pulseless heart, weighing all things in the balance of reason?
Is not rather the genius of history like an eternal, imploring maiden, full of fire, with a burning heart and flaming soul, humanly warm and humanly beautiful?
--Zachris Topelius
Training a telescope on one’s own belly button will only reveal lint. You like that? You go right on staring at it. I prefer looking at galaxies.
-- Sarah Hoyt
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I must've skipped that in my initial post - yes, I did nuke the existing driver as thoroughly as I could, and downloaded the latest from the manufacturer--which in this case turned out to date from 2009 (!)... In fact I always go to the OEM's site first for drivers, rather than using those from Windows Update, as those tend to be a few versions behind (although in this case...you'd think they'd have the latest already, since it's this old). The end result was the same--even though Device Manager correctly identified it by name, the Metrofied portion still referred to it as "Basic Display". First time I've seen different parts of the OS disagreeing with each other.
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I'm surprised it dropped out of the main driver that long ago. I'd've expected at least 4 years of nominal support (in the main driver even if no longer an optimizing target) based on my experience with nvidia drivers. I was under the impression the ATI/AMD kept similar support lifespans, if only to avoid being beaten over the head with the shorter number by the competition's marketing dept.
Did you ever see history portrayed as an old man with a wise brow and pulseless heart, weighing all things in the balance of reason?
Is not rather the genius of history like an eternal, imploring maiden, full of fire, with a burning heart and flaming soul, humanly warm and humanly beautiful?
--Zachris Topelius
Training a telescope on one’s own belly button will only reveal lint. You like that? You go right on staring at it. I prefer looking at galaxies.
-- Sarah Hoyt
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