Thankfully A Slow Start And Hopefully A Careful One
The headline is scarier that the reality, but since Microsoft made this announcement very quietly it’s worth paying attention. In a recent, relatively obscure blog post, Microsoft informed those who found it that they are removing “legacy drivers that have newer replacements already on Windows Update.” This is the first step of a new initiative at Microsoft to clean up years of old drivers which have accumulated and pose a security threat to someone unwittingly installing an ancient driver by accident. It will also likely help the performance of Windows Update, by shrinking the size of the database it pulls drivers from.
There is a potential risk associated with this new initiative though, as they could completely remove the drivers for some legacy devices. After all, we’ve seen Microsoft happily make large swaths of computers obsolete by requiring TPM to install Windows 11. The program is currently only removing old versions of drivers to which new ones are available, but old hardware can be cranky and refuse to run on anything but a specific driver version. If the program extends to completely removing the drivers for old hardware, you could find you are no longer able to easily rebuild a beloved legacy machine as you would have to hunt around the web for drivers. This could be a very bad thing, as it is hard to guarantee those drivers have not been tampered with.
Enterprise customers should also beware, as their infrastructure is often full of ancient but still mission critical hardware. Once the drivers are removed Microsoft offers a six month window for you to reach out to them to try to have the driver restored, but you will have to find a way to convince them it is necessary. The blog post warns you should keep an eye out to see what drivers are being removed, but it doesn’t tell you exactly where you should go to monitor this initiative. There is also the concern that Microsoft didn’t bother to inform anyone which drivers were being removed during this initial step.
It’s not something to panic about, but definitely something you should be aware of.