It never ends.

Well, I haven't done anything here for a while, so it's about time. 

I have been carefully ignoring Windows 10, as I don't use it myself, but I have to maintain a few Windows machines for the other half. These were supposed to be Windows 7, with one Windows 8.1 for testing. This all went wrong, some updated themselves to windows 10, and someone got few up with the nagging, and let the main production machine update. This resulted in days and days of on-and-off downtime, and much banging my head against a brick wall. 

The final straw was my dual-boot system, where the Windows 10 update removed my Linux partition completely. Is that badly behaved, or what? Anyway, things are settling down slowly, although I can't believe how sluggish this supposedly snappy new system is, and some small peripherals still don't work.

Just as a flavour of the sort of issues, things have been reasonably quiet for almost a month, when the scanner part of the multi-function printer stopped working. Some update has borked the driver. Further investigation, and the manufacturer is no longer listing a Windows 10 driver for this model.

What! 

I cast my mind back to similar nonsense from years ago, and I go to the American website, and find a driver for a similar model. It looks the same, but the American one has a different model number to the European one. This driver has no resemblance to the old one, either in name or look, but it works. I wonder for how long? Who thought automatic updates without details of what was being updated was a good idea?

And just in case you thought it was only Windows 10, we have a couple of old laptops that are stuck on XP. No more updates, so stable enough for searching for W10 problems on the internet.  Unfortunately, other stuff is still changing, and both went wrong at the same time.  One continually reboots as soon as it starts, and the other blue screens with that IRQ_NOT_EQUAL nonsense. Fortunately it accuses timfsony.sys of causing this.  This is the driver for the sony/TI memory stick adapter. 

You can cure this by booting into safe mode and removing flash. Who'd have thought of that?  This isn't convenient, so we go into system/devices and disable the sony/TI memory stick (which I don't use anyway).  I could then re-install flash and carry on. 

Rant over.  The sun's out, and it's time to walk the dog.