Podcast: Play in new window | Embed
As we close in on Black Friday – only about a month away now – there’s a good chance that tech devices are somewhere on your shopping list. Lexie de los Santos with the Consumer Electronics Association explains in this week’s “CEA Update”
Tech gifts will be a hot commodity this holiday season. CEA’s, 22nd Annual CE Holiday Purchase Patterns Study, reports 65% of Americans plan to buy tech this holiday season.
According to the study, one in three of us plan on buying an emerging tech product such as a SmartHome device, a fitness activity tracker or a drone.
And CEA estimates that holiday spending will be huge this year reaching nearly $342 billion, that’s up 2.3 percent over last year’s total.
The top five tech devices that shoppers plan to gift this year, according to CEA, headphones and earbuds, tablets, blue tooth speakers, smartphones, and laptop computers.
To learn more, visit CE.org/Holiday
Andrew in North Pole, Alaska listening on Newsradio 970 KFBX asked about Windows Updates replacing his drivers
Andrew asked: “Do you hear of anyone having issues with their wireless network cards being shut down because of Windows Updates? I have not updated my laptop in about 4 months because I have yet to find a fix from the manufacturer or anyone else.”
Andrew, you’re not alone and this is one the reasons so many people hate Windows 10 autoupdate policy: sometimes Windows updates break drivers. You probably don’t need a fix, since the manufacturer won’t consider there is anything to fix, their drivers work just fine, you just replaced them with someone else’s drivers that don’t work (in this case whatever Microsoft pushed).
You actually need to go back to whatever drivers you used to have before, so rather than looking for something that fixes the broken WiFi functionality, just look for current drivers from the manufacturer and hopefully that will make the problem go away.
The easiest way to go back to the drivers you used to have, is actually to have Windows do it.
Just right click on “Computer” and select “Manage,” then select “Device Manager,” double click on the wireless driver under “Network adapters,” select the “Driver” tab, and finally click on “Roll Back Driver.”
That should put things back to how they were before.
Just right click on “Computer” and select “Manage,” then select “Device Manager,” double click on the wireless driver under “Network adapters,” select the “Driver” tab, and finally click on “Roll Back Driver.”
Of course, Windows 10 doesn’t ask you regarding updates, it simply installs them. So you might find yourself right back in the same position again. You might want to check with the computer’s manufacturer, as opposed to the wireless card manufacturer, and see whether they offer a driver and wireless settings combo package. Some do.
Having a combination like that will sometimes allow you to bypass the drivers from the wireless card manufacturer and Microsoft, at the same time.
The other thing we have to say is that when we heard stories like yours, they almost always turn out to come from older model computers. There is no question that planned obsolescence is a real thing in the tech world, so you might be fighting a losing battle against replacing your computer sooner than you’d otherwise like.