Design, UX, Tech - Old man yells at cloud!

Many brand computers got pile of poop driver packages, including Lenovo. Well, who's surprised that the support and installation processes are badly designed, misleading and generally crappy, made to anger even expert users. It's obvious that they haven't ever thought about driver delivery and the messages shown to the user. - Windows 11 setup prompts for WiFi drivers. - Lenovo offers only .exe drivers. - Windows doesn't handle .exe drivers, .exe is zip-file which you can extract. Good! - Except it's not, the zip file contains some nested and exotic stuff which Windows doesn't understand, probably another achiever, packer, compressor using some other algorithm, without any detectable headers. - Running the .exe on other computer says that it needs administrative rights to install drivers. - Well, I don't want to install the wrong drivers to the wrong computer so I abort. -> Stuck at this point. - 

Lenovo doesn't tell on their product information page exactly what the network driver is which required for the laptop's WiFi to work, they only got their own obfuscated messy package. Simple things, yet amazing sh1t show.

I've got a friend whom has dealt with Lenovo stuff before. And he did dig some spare parts and components lists from their service site, which listed the network card likely type. So, it was possible to get sane drivers from the hardware manufacturer directly (Realtek). It seems that they're running some tar pitting on their driver page. All downloads are limited to 20 kilobytes/s, probably to make it less likely that the same users would endlessly download the same drivers from their site, as some users do. 

After getting the system up and running, I started the Lenovo drive package again, and granted the permissions to install drivers. But then I got a prompt which offers me options ["extract only", "install"]. - Why! Why they first say they're going to need permissions to install, and after that, they do offer option to extract it. Since when extracting SFX archive has required administrative rights to the users directory where they can write? Great example of utterly stupid design, and misleading messaging designed by incompetent people. - Thank you for that!

Yet another example of things which are totally and utterly crappy, just because the team doing the shi7 doesn't think how the sĥ1t should be done, so it would be actually usable. Instead of requiring tricks and gimmicks and or prior experience of doing it. - Which is exactly the wrong thing to require for things like these, which are quite likely only done 0 - 1 times during the whole systems lifetime and often by people whom might not have deal with the specific installation process earlier.

If I want to say something positive, it's the fact that the laptop had a QR code sticker directly to the right support page, with the correct model information. Which is actually great! No more: "downloading some random programs solving your driver / system problems from some shady site", we all know too well where that leads to.

Ok, then someone asked, why would anyone want to reinstall Windows. - That's a valid question. - Because Windows Update was so totally effed up, so... Again, bleepeti bleep. I didn't WANT TO install Windows again, I HAD TO due to bad engineering and crappy software. - Why it's always the same story?

... Continued two weeks later ... 

You think that was all? No, it turns out even worse, or maybe better? The Windows was messed up earlier, but the problems which caused the Windows to be messed up in the first place started soon enough. Ie. system didn't work and required hard boot, which ... yeah... when done repeatedly... I would advice against that. 

The owner of the laptop was devastated about that. I was also upset, all that effort and it didn't help. But then I started to dig deeper. I had updated all official drivers, and so on. And it still crashed. I tried load testing, burn-in testing and torturing the laptop with every possible Linux tool. No problems, no problems whatsoever. W7F? So it's broken or not? Based on my hardware experience, I would say it's probably NOT broken. - Sigh.

Then digging deeper into the event logs and user experiences when did this happen and so on. I figured out that actually the network traffic continued even if the system "crashed". A-ha! That shouldn't happen. Digging the logs I noticed that when the issue occurred there were something about Intel ARC. But but... I just made sure we've got the latest drivers... From Lenovo. Yep, you guessed it. Lenovo had old BS drivers and no updates fixing the actual issue.

Then I downloaded the latest suitable drivers from Intel's site directly based on the GPU model information and after that all the problems went away. - So again, bleep bleep bleep. Why they deliver such bleep, and guess how many users would have been absolutely out of luck with this kind of uh ah, nice and comforting user experience.

Wonderful, infuriating and frustrating experience, it's so nice to have all this tech.

2025-12-14