SoylentNews is people
SoylentNews
Many Windows 10 users are suffering from a bug which causes wi-fi connections to disconnect.
Recently, some users have noticed (probably abruptly) that their Wi-Fi dropped out, with Windows complaining about an invalid IP configuration. Microsoft released a patch just the other day (who enjoyed a good ol' fashioned forced reboot from it?) that could have fixed the issue, but didn't.
Speculation at this point says the disconnect results when a machine performs a fast startup, setting the machine's IP address to 169.x.x.x. It's an old problem, but somehow it's come back in spades in the past two days. I have no idea what triggered the sudden outbreak, as there were no Win10 1607 patches issued on Dec. 6, 7 or 8.
This scoop was sent from my ArchLinux laptop connected through wifi. It's hard not to be a little smug about it. ;-)
(Score: 2) by Nerdfest on Monday December 12 2016, @03:09PM
I'm not sure if this is a related problem, but I saw something similar to this last week when a person on a Windows 10 machine tried to connect to my local network. Got connected but no internet access. Check it out and Windows kept giving him an address in the wrong subnet; "192.168.*1*.x", rather than the proper subnet. The usual Windows "try a reboot" solved the problem. What the hell is wrong with Microsoft? You'd think they'd have some test cases in place. Even then, perhaps it would be a problem as the behaviour of Windows seems exceptionally inconsistent from machine to machine, even for very simple operations.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday December 12 2016, @05:08PM
Same here, we use an IP range in the 10s broken up by department, but machines kept insisting their IPs were 192.168.1 range or link local.
(Score: 3, Informative) by MrNemesis on Monday December 12 2016, @05:39PM
Not any more; Satya fired pretty much the whole QA division when he took up the helm. His schpiel was that a) MS devs were do good that software engineers would be perfectly capable of foreseeing edge cases and testing their own code b) any errors in evident after the deployment would be reported by telemetry on user machines and fixed upstream instantly and c) anything that somehow slipped through this airtight safety net would be picked up by legions of loyal tech-savvy users in the Insider program.
"To paraphrase Nietzsche, I have looked into the abyss and been sick in it."
(Score: 4, Interesting) by etherscythe on Monday December 12 2016, @06:54PM
Quite so. My Microsoft contact literally suggested joining the Microsoft Insider program as part of the response to a major hardware brick issue stemming from a forced BIOS update pushed through... Windows Update. "Help us catch these things sooner", basically was his response. Because I have time to do his job for him, on top of my own? Not to mention it would be exceedingly difficult to narrow down which update is causing the problem because Windows 10 DOES NOT ASK. It just does it. All of them. I knew such a0 day was coming when I learned about that update policy, I just didn't expect Microsoft to be so stupid that they would distribute firmware updates directly to CMOS with no user prompt.
"Fake News: anything reported outside of my own personally chosen echo chamber"
(Score: 2) by Hyperturtle on Wednesday December 14 2016, @05:42PM
You got a bios update? From windows update? My god. I mod my own bioses and incorporate the chipset features I want on hardware built in -- like the intel SATA/RAID controller and updating that from version 10 to 15, or the LSI/Avaga scsi/SAS controller from version 13 to version 20 -- or the marvel ESATA to something that supports a quick disconnect more gracefully, or broadcomm gigabit nics doing tcp checksums better in a beta version they have on their website for test only... or CPU microdode for my lga 775 modded to lga 771 motherboard so I can upgrade the processor or better provide support for one I already have... Their changing the bios can actually ruin customized computers like that, because with an unexpected bios change, after a reboot the processor may no longer even be supported, the raid features gone... wow this is the pinnacle of forced convenience that sucks.
To me, the BIOS has always been the holy grail of what you protect, you do not autoupdate this ever, because if a virus got in at the bare metal, or became corrupted... you can't even pick a different OS to get away from the problem. You're screwed if you don't know what happened to go and undo it. I see people do it with video cards often enough, but I've always updated mine manually... you never know what you are getting and if you can get back to what you had in case it has a problem.
Many bios updates are often one-way trips, too, where they redo various settings that cannot be downgraded. Getting something like that via Windows Update...
If MICROSOFT decided to just undo all of my effort, whoa would I be pissed--beyond words. It is one thing for them to mess up the OS. Undoing my meticuloously patched BIOS modifications that may have features incorporated that simply don't exist outside of it except if I were to buy all new hardware (because it may the SAME features in hardware with newer roms that are... part of the BIOS, so they are not seperately chippable).. that is totally unacceptable. I had no idea they were doing that in windows 10.
I thought what they were doing already was bad enough! For some people I am sure this is a convenience, but bios updates... can really screw a machine if done wrong, if interrupted (power blip?) or whatever. It's the last element of control one has over the PC and I guess that is being removed as well.
(