You’ve never lived until you’ve had to download a driver from an archived forum post on the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine.
You have no idea if it’s going to work, but it’s your only option. So you bite the bullet. I recently did this with a PCI-based SATA card I was attempting to flash to support a PowerPC-based Mac, and while it was a bit of a leap of faith, it actually ended up working. Score one for chance.
But this, increasingly, feels like it may be a way of life for people trying to keep old hardware alive—despite the fact that all the drivers generally have to do is simply sit on the internet, available when they’re necessary.
This problem is only going to get worse as time progresses. We’ll have to hope random people on the internet are kind enough to upload any drivers they’ve collected and held on to over the years, so users of classic hardware can keep them running.
This is so very true. I have a few computers that used to be easily supported. Not so much now. It may be time to donate them – let somebody else deal with the hassle.
Drunkula,
I’ve collected all the drivers & manuals I ever downloaded in a central repository. This was more useful when I was using windows than it is now. In retro-spect, additionally I should have been taking pictures of the hardware and recording the lspci/psusb output since this is very useful information to have when looking for drivers!
Thom Holwerda,
I’d host the drivers I have if it weren’t for the severity of DMCA copyright claims. I remember one client being hit with a takedown request by getty images and several thousand dollar fees. The circumstances were weird too since a customer of my client’s were allegedly using a copyrighted getty image for their own business, which was on my client’s website. Getty’s web-spider takes up a good deal of bandwidth too, it’s best to block them. Getty is notorious for these copyright fishing expeditions and they rely on the fact that it’s much more expensive to defend yourself in court than to settle. So although hosting copyrighted drivers is nice for users who need them to use their own hardware, it’s legally frowned upon 🙁
Drivers are “redistributable” software. Nobody has ever been sued for it. Compared to Getty images which is analogous to hosting a ripped MP3 from a commercial CD.
kurkosdr,
I’m looking at several of my drivers right now, and they do NOT say that. I know that’s a reasonable view, but legally speaking I don’t think the law has any exceptions for “redistributable software” claiming to be copyrighted without giving users the express permission to redistribute drivers. It’s not like the GPL where such rights are expressly given.
Maybe time to mass letter-write to Congress (naive I know…) – and cite first some military system that runs on some obscure hardware. Or even Win92 (whichever one was before 95 that had the “text-GUI”). Preferably something like a nuclear missile launch system – something they (shouldn’t) be able to ignore.
Also, some of the drivers were actually ripped from the commercial CD that came with the hardware.
Microsoft could host all drivers in Windows Update, since, from Windows 10 onwards, no driver can be installed unless it’s signed by them, so they definitely have control nowadays.
They won’t. Think about it. If all drivers need be signed, and these old drivers would probably not be signed, then Microsoft would not distribute them in Windows Update. A lot of these old drivers can’t even be installed anymore without working around the signature requirement, and sometimes don’t work even then.
I am talking about the future. There is no reason why, for any device that works with Windows 10 (and hence has signed drivers) the drivers shouldn’t be hosted by Microsoft in Windows Update so that 5 years from now (Windows 10 being 10 years old at that point), all Windows 10 devices will still work without a scavenger hunt.
kurkosdr,
Should microsoft let users download drivers for “offline” installation? I don’t know if this is still as big a problem with windows 10 – I pretty much moved off windows after 7, but I know that previously installing network drivers was problematic without install media. I frequently used a linux live boot cd to download the windows drivers 🙂 Also it’s not just the windows drivers, but also firmware updates, many of which need to be installed via bios and/or third party flashing software. For example with the dell servers I have, firmware updates are installed through dell’s open-manage tools and not windows update.
I run into this all the time, on the Thinkpad 770 I lucked out sort of because Lenovo hosts all their and IBMs old drivers still. But when trying to upgrade the firmware on a PCMCIA netgear card? Good luck! Had to install XP for it to work…. only to find out the particular revision was the wrong one I was looking for….
It is harder to support old x86 hardware though than say Amiga / Atari expansions. Generally no drivers needed, or if they are, someone on the respective forums have them.
Linux is usually the best choice for older hardware. Even though recent Linux releases drop drivers from time to time, it is at least possible to download historic versions with ease. Here, for example, Slackware 1.0:
https://mirrors.slackware.com/slackware/slackware-1.01/
For Windows, the best choices are:
– Trying the latest version, and hoping Windows Update to have some support
– Actually preserving the installation CDs (and God forbid! floppies) with the system. Making a backup (preferably on a NAS) would go a long way
I am not sure about Mac, but Apple used to host older OS versions on their FTP side back in the day.
sukru: “and God forbid! floppies”
I dd’ed my floppies long time ago, and keep the backup, just in case.
I even wrote my own utility: http://pedroreina.net/antiguo/imagen/hiperipe.png
PedroReina,
That’s very thorough of you 🙂 I never went that far, I only saved the files to a NAS.
Alfman: “I only saved the files to a NAS”
Having one backup is indeed much better than having no one. I learned that the hard way… twice. So, now I have a NAS (in fact a noiseless Debian rig) and four separate backups of its content. YMMV, of course.
And, back to the floppies, in more than 20 years I’ve used one of the images just once. But happy to have them!
The general public do not realise how insidious this problem can be long term. They can go out and purchase a new laptop or desktop and be up and running in 24hrs after much heartache.
I’ve legacy R&D hardware, that has been meticulously maintained over decades. Devices like white light interferometers and electron microscopes, devices that may be 15 or twenty years old but are in pristine condition, however the hardware that the control systems run on is outdated and obsolete. Typically Win XP or even Win NT, Legacy 16-Bit ISA or 1st Gen PCI hardware standards the PC industry see no reason to support, and despite stocking a large array of spares getting parts is becoming a nightmare not just because of the hardware but because of drivers as well. These are not trivial bits of kit, they are worth six figure sums to replace and yet it’ll be the $500 PC or ancillary components that bring them undone in the long term!