{"id":198100,"date":"2017-02-09T16:43:08","date_gmt":"2017-02-09T14:43:08","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/?p=198100"},"modified":"2017-02-09T16:45:40","modified_gmt":"2017-02-09T14:45:40","slug":"why-all-windows-drivers-are-dated-21-june-2006","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/software\/198100-why-all-windows-drivers-are-dated-21-june-2006.html","title":{"rendered":"Why all Windows drivers are dated 21 June 2006"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Microsoft has detailed on its <a href=\"https:\/\/blogs.msdn.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/20170208-00\/?p=95395\" target=\"_blank\"><strong>Developer Blog<\/strong><\/a> why all\u00a0Windows drivers are dated June 21, 2006.<\/p>\n<p>&#8220;What&#8217;s more, the date of June 21, 2006 applies even to drivers like Storage Spaces, which didn&#8217;t even exist in 2006! Has the Research division been using their time machine again?&#8221; stated Microsoft&#8217;s Raymond Chen.<\/p>\n<p>Chen detailed a colleague&#8217;s explanation as to why this is the case.<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>When the system looks for a driver to use for a particular piece of hardware, it ranks them according to various criteria. If a driver provides a perfect match to the hardware ID, then it becomes a top candidate.<\/p>\n<p>And if more than one driver provides a perfect match, then the one with the most recent timestamp is chosen. If there is still a tie, then the one with the highest file version number is chosen.<\/p>\n<p>Suppose that the timestamp on the driver matched the build release date. And suppose you had a custom driver provided by the manufacturer. When you installed a new build, the driver provided by Windows will have a newer timestamp than the one provided by the manufacturer. Result: When you install a new build, all your manufacturer-provided drivers get replaced by the Windows drivers. Oops.<\/p>\n<p>Intentionally backdating the drivers avoids this problem. It means that if you have a custom manufacturer-provided driver, it will retain priority over the Windows-provided driver. On the other hand, if your existing driver was the Windows-provided driver from an earlier build, then the third-level selection rule will choose the one with the higher version number, which is the one from the more recent build.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>It all works out in the end, but it does look a bit funny, the post concludes.<\/p>\n<h3 class=\"my-4\">Now read:\u00a0<a href=\"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/software\/198001-windows-10-to-get-picture-in-picture-functionality.html\" rel=\"bookmark\">Windows 10 to get picture-in-picture functionality<\/a><\/h3>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Microsoft has detailed on its Developer Blog why all Windows drivers are dated June 21, 2006.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":23,"featured_media":131398,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[16],"tags":[123,807,41240],"class_list":["post-198100","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-software","tag-microsoft","tag-windows","tag-windows-drivers"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/198100"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/23"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=198100"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/198100\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":198106,"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/198100\/revisions\/198106"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/131398"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=198100"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=198100"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=198100"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}