Intel removing old drivers and BIOS updates

[msknight]

Reported on ZDNet - https://www.zdnet.com/article/intel-to-remove-old-drivers-and-bios-updates-from-its-site-by-the-end-of-the-week/

 

Quote

 

The downloads are drivers and BIOS updates for Intel desktop components and motherboards the company released in the 90s and early-to-mid 2000s.

Downloads for hundreds of components are believed to have been impacted, from motherboards to NIC cards and graphics cards.

 

 

So, Linus is going to have to act quickly if he wants to get his library of old motherboards updated!

 

This is going to affect the retro community, particularly the gaming folks who use the older hardware to keep their games alive... particularly those that require the hardware for license checking. I guess my shelf of older CD games is going to take a hit. We have until the end of the week. Eek!

[rcmaehl]

RIP. I got a bunch of Pentium II / Pentium III stuff I'll need to download then.

[Murasaki]

Oh man, someone archive them please.

[msknight]

Just now, Murasaki said:

Oh man, someone archive them please.

There are two archives listed in the article near the bottom.

[Murasaki]

Just now, msknight said:

There are two archives listed in the article near the bottom.

Ah thats good to hear.

[Vishera]

Does Intel have storage problems?,

Those drivers don't weigh anything,I don't see why Intel does that.

[BachChain]

Quote

This all could've been avoided if you'd just bought a Xeon instead of Threadripper.

-Intel

[RejZoR]

Well, you can always rely on SDI (Snappy Driver Updater) and Station Drivers to get the old (and new) drivers.

[RejZoR]

Though lets be realistic here, pre-2000 era are Pentium 3 and 4 level stuff. Who really still uses this when you can get retired Core 2 Duo based workstations literally for peanuts these days if you really want to go for bottom of the barrel cheap stuff? And those will still have support.

[paddy-stone]

 

6 minutes ago, RejZoR said:

Though lets be realistic here, pre-2000 era are Pentium 3 and 4 level stuff. Who really still uses this when you can get retired Core 2 Duo based workstations literally for peanuts these days if you really want to go for bottom of the barrel cheap stuff? And those will still have support.

 

I threw a core2duo away in like 2010-2011 as I didn't know anyone that would have wanted it

 

At the time, most people I knew were upgrading to hex core phenoms (like me), or intels newest i3/i5/i7 lineup. I literally couldn't give it away at the time, so junked it.

[vanished]

This is inevitable, I'm amazed they even kept it that long.  Just as the hardware itself will one day cease to exist, so will the drivers.  Sure, the former is an unavoidable fact of life while the latter is a choice, but it's a choice that shouldn't be seen as evil or unreasonable due to the existence of the former.  Anyone who for some reason cares about and need these things will have made a copy for themselves long ago, and if not, then they're not likely to need it anyway because someone who can't be bothered to save some drivers is very likely also not going to have saved multiple motherboards to go with it, and so when their single one fails, that'll be that.

[Kisai]

1 hour ago, Vishera said:

Does Intel have storage problems?,

Those drivers don't weigh anything,I don't see why Intel does that.

Probably it's to de-clutter the search system. Ever try to search for anything on Intel's site? 

 

Most other vendors ask you for the product id/serial, then present what matches with that serial. Intel doesn't do that.

[MichaelWd]

Also to reduce the support burden. Emails questions/issues will probably drop off if they aren't hosted officially

[Animal901]

1 hour ago, paddy-stone said:

 

 

I threw a core2duo away in like 2010-2011 as I didn't know anyone that would have wanted it

 

At the time, most people I knew were upgrading to hex core phenoms (like me), or intels newest i3/i5/i7 lineup. I literally couldn't give it away at the time, so junked it.

Sounds like it was a bad build. I find myself doing more rebuilds of those core 2 duo/quads than any work I've ever done for pc maintenance. If those can still hang after an ssd, ram, and gpu upgrade. Sometimes even new cases.  Then tech is truly stagnant. Pentium 4 would be laughable at this point. I guess its hard throwing away an almost 3ghz quad core with 12mb cache 1333mhz fsb. They did make alot of junky ones though. 

[williamcll]

Linus' never going to find that driver for the xeon Phi accelerator card at this rate.

[Arika]

8 hours ago, Grand Admiral Thrawn said:

"Oh I am sorry that you can not find your drivers, guess you will have to buy newer hardware."

...yeah because the people that are using 15+ year old computers really care about needing to be able to download drivers.

[Bombastinator]

9 hours ago, RejZoR said:

Though lets be realistic here, pre-2000 era are Pentium 3 and 4 level stuff. Who really still uses this when you can get retired Core 2 Duo based workstations literally for peanuts these days if you really want to go for bottom of the barrel cheap stuff? And those will still have support.

Will they though?  Still not seeing specifics on this one.  What is the cutoff?  I’ve got some 2006 era stuff still running and a quadro q series I was hoping to unload.

[Arika]

17 minutes ago, Bombastinator said:

Will they though?  Still not seeing specifics on this one.  What is the cutoff?  I’ve got some 2006 era stuff still running and a quadro q series I was hoping to unload.

just download the drivers onto a USB and package that with the hardware. though i can't imagine there are going to be a big change in the amount of buyers looking for something like that after this change goes through

[Bombastinator]

6 minutes ago, Arika S said:

just download the drivers onto a USB and package that with the hardware. though i can't imagine there are going to be a big change in the amount of buyers looking for something like that after this change goes through

Argh.  Off to freegeek it goes I guess.  

[atxcyclist]

I don't have anything that's older than Core2 at this point that I'll need drivers for, but that sucks. Glad to see that mirrors exist, there may still be some people running stuff that old somewhere.

[ARikozuM]

If this isn't forced obsolescence I don't know what is. 

[vanished]

1 hour ago, ARikozuM said:

If this isn't forced obsolescence I don't know what is. 

Doesn't the concept of forced obsolescence imply or require the company killing off an otherwise current, non-obsolete product to push people to a newer one?  If they dropped driver support for Z170 boards I'd agree completely but this is hardware from the 90s.  It was already well beyond obsolete on its own before Intel made this decision.

[ARikozuM]

53 minutes ago, Ryan_Vickers said:

Doesn't the concept of forced obsolescence imply or require the company killing off an otherwise current, non-obsolete product to push people to a newer one?  If they dropped driver support for Z170 boards I'd agree completely but this is hardware from the 90s.  It was already well beyond obsolete on its own before Intel made this decision.

I could agree with most things, but hardware from the 2000s is still alive and usable. The files aren't large and they could offload the files to Github or similar. 

[RejZoR]

9 hours ago, ARikozuM said:

If this isn't forced obsolescence I don't know what is. 

Not on almost 2 decades old products... What you say would be if Intel forced everyone with Core i7 9900K to lose any support for it next year because they really wanted to sell 10990K or whatever it's gonna be called. That would be forced obsolescence. This is going to be mildly annoying for those few users who still use prehistoric system and for those who are nostalgic and run old one for really old games or something. The first ones should really buy a new system in 10+ years time and second ones are probably resourceful enough to dig the drivers anyway from somewhere.