Old computers not yet compatible with 1703 (Broadcom 440x driver)

DavidY said:

Mine's an Acer laptop, but no BIOS option unfortunately.

Yes I'll probably end up skipping to the second Creators' Update as well. The machine needs a clean install in any case so I may as well wait until the next release and clean-install that one.

wow Acer is really stupid for not including a BIOS option to disable/enable onboard LAN or integrated LAN/NIC.
at least Dell and HP have such BIOS option available [now I know my next desktop or laptop PC won't be an Acer brand, ha ]

no recent cumulative update for Win10 v1703 will make the Broadcom 440x device work under there - I tried it last month with KB4022725 & KB4022716 and Win10 v1703 either hangs on the startup screen with the circling dots or hangs on the desktop & constantly using between 50%-100% CPU resources when the Broadcom 440x device is enabled.

erpster4 said:

[now I know my next desktop or laptop PC won't be an Acer brand, ha ]

Well it's still going and it's 10 years old, so I can't really complain.
Realistically I think all laptop manufacturers have changed so much in that time that it's probably not useful to judge them based on what they were like 10 years ago, whether good or bad.

erpster4 said:

no recent cumulative update for Win10 v1703 will make the Broadcom 440x device work under there - I tried it last month with KB4022725 & KB4022716 and Win10 v1703 either hangs on the startup screen with the circling dots or hangs on the desktop & constantly using between 50%-100% CPU resources when the Broadcom 440x device is enabled.

The Preview versions of the *next* Creators Update should have the fix though, including the ISO version that's in Slow Ring. Although I can't get it to update further on that laptop. It wouldn't surprise me if they don't issue a fix to 1703 and just tell people to skip to 1709 (or whatever it turns out to be), as it isn't that far away.

It looks like there is now an official fix in the latest cumulative update to version 1703.

https://answers.microsoft.com/messag...3-a64b92445385

Travis_MSFT said:

I can confirm that the latest cumulative update has the Broadcom 440x fix. It was released 18 hours ago. For those that are curious this is build 15063.502. This has been a long four month drive to getting this fix investigated, fixed, and released. Thank you all for your patience. If you continue to have issues with the Broadcom 440x after applying this update please let us know on this thread.

DavidY said:

It looks like there is now an official fix in the latest cumulative update to version 1703.

https://answers.microsoft.com/messag...3-a64b92445385

Cool!

A bit more info on that thread on the process of how Microsoft look into these things. I found the use of telemetry interesting too.

Travis_MSFT said:

In case you are curious about my role here and how we do this...I am an engineer in the Quality team that owns Core Networking. This includes LAN, firewall, TCP/IP, and a host of other basic networking technologies. I also work closely with those in wifi, cellular, and printing. My job is to identify bugs after we release and drive the fixes back in the product. In this case I was notified from a colleague that our telemetry was reporting a disproportionate rise in update roll backs with this network adapter. I went to this forum and to reddit to try to corroborate what we were seeing. Once I saw it was an issue I tried to get hardware that had this adapter. This was hard to do as this is Vista era. I went through Tyler who is our Support contact to get logs directly from some of you. I also found a guy I worked with that had a personal Dell Inspiron 9300 at home that he donated to the cause. With logs from the community and the repro laptop we determined the cause quickly. I built a fix myself to prove that it worked and started engaging with the owners of TCPIP to get the fix put in.

A question that is often asked is "how many people are affected by this". The answer for the Broadcom 440x issue is about 150,000. That represents a very small percentage of all windows 10 users. Something like .03%. However I was always able to point to this thread for justification to get the fix in. In other words...this fix was brought by you. Without your engagement I would not have had the ammunition to get the fix approved. So thank you very much!

Please continue to post your issues on the forums, reddit, twitter, and most importantly Feedback Hub. There are lots of here that read through what you have to say. I weekly present your posts to managers and directors so they understand the joys and pains you experience.

From
https://answers.microsoft.com/messag...3-a64b92445385

DavidY said:

A bit more info on that thread on the process of how Microsoft look into these things. I found the use of telemetry interesting too.

Thanks for that, David. Great info. :)

DavidY said:

A bit more info on that thread on the process of how Microsoft look into these things. I found the use of telemetry interesting too.



From
https://answers.microsoft.com/messag...3-a64b92445385

Also be aware there may be BIOS update prereqs or coreqs required as well. My wife's Dell is not quite 3 years old, the July 14th Win 10 Update made her WIFI switch automagically between discovered networks and then the Win 10 update a day or two ago completely knocked out any and all WIFI connectivity (WIFI Adapter Failure reported). Went to Dell and downloaded the May 2017 "Urgent" BIOS update (9343_A12.exe) and installed it. WIFI connectivity returned to automagically switching between discovered WIFI nodes so I rolled back the Broadcom Wireless Adapter Driver (7.35.333.0) and WIFI connectivity has returned to normal (no more WIFI auto-switching between nodes). WIFI connectivity has been very stable for the last 24 hours.

My laptop has the Broadcom 440x issue, but unfortunately I don't have an option to disable the adaptor in the BIOS, so the workaround of installing 1703 with the adaptor disabled doesn't work for me.

However, I did get it to clean install 1703 earlier today, by using the DISM utility to inject the latest cumulative update into the 1703 installer *before* actually running the installation.

And it worked too, so I thought I'd post what I did in case it helps anyone.

I perhaps made a mistake by using the Media Creation Tool to create a 1703 installation USB, because this uses a file called install.esd to hold the main Windows installation. If I'd used one of the various workarounds to download a straight ISO (eg. logging in to the download page with the browser User Agent String set to look like an iPad or something) I'd have been able to download an ISO containing install.wim, which would have saved me some steps.

Note that the steps below can go wrong in various ways to make sure you have backup images of everything you care about, before trying to follow these steps.

If you don't know what DISM is, then I suggest you don't try these steps, as things can occasionally go wrong and it isn't always obvious how to resolve them.

Here's what I did:
1 Use the Media Creation Tool to create a USB drive installer for 1703. My machine is 32-bit so I selected the option for the 32-bit installer.

2 Go to the Microsoft Update Catalog to find and download the latest Cumulative Update for 1703. At time of writing, it's: http://www.catalog.update.microsoft....px?q=kb4034674

Again my machine is 32-bit so I downloaded the 'x86' version, which got me a file to download called:
windows10.0-kb4034674-x86_277929e9393c8566e74eb72037bc7fd29cc6b406.msu

I created a folder called C:\Temp\KB4034674 to contain this file, so it's saved as:
C:\Temp\KB4034674\windows10.0-kb4034674-x86_277929e9393c8566e74eb72037bc7fd29cc6b406.msu

3 Copy the file install.esd from the \sources folder on my USB drive, to a working folder (C:\Temp) on my computer, and rename it to C:\Temp\install_orig.esd.

4 Create the subfolder C:\Temp\Mount in File Explorer. Then close down File Explorer altogether, and keep it closed, as I've had times when it can interfere with this process, just by having a certain folder open. I've had problems with the DISM command when I've been tempted to open File Explorer to see what's going on near to a folder with a Mounted image.

5 Open up an Elevated Command Prompt

6 Type this command (and press enter), to look for the "Index" parameter which describes the edition of Windows 10 you have on the target machine:

Code:

Dism /Get-ImageInfo /ImageFile:C:\Temp\install_Orig.esd

For mine it was Index=1 as I have Windows 10 Pro, but a lot of people will have Index=2 for Windows 10 Home

7 Use this command to export the .ESD format file to .WIM format. Change the SourceIndex parameter based on the answer from step 6

Code:

dism /export-image /SourceImageFile:C:\Temp\install_Orig.esd /SourceIndex:1 /DestinationImageFile:C:\Temp\install.wim /Compress:max /CheckIntegrity

8 This step is like Step 6, and again we want to check the index value, but this time it's from the install.wim file. I suspect the answer will always be Index=1

Code:

Dism /Get-ImageInfo /ImageFile:C:\Temp\install.wim

9 This command 'mounts' the install.wim we exported earlier. By Mounting it, we can make changes (eg. adding updates). The Index parameter is the answer from step 8 (probably Index=1). It will take some time, as will the next few steps

Code:

Dism /Mount-Image /ImageFile:C:\Temp\install.wim /index:1 /MountDir:C:\Temp\Mount

10 This command applies the Cumulative update from step 2.

Code:

Dism /Image:C:\Temp\Mount /LogPath:C:\Temp\AddPackage.log /Add-Package /PackagePath:C:\Temp\KB4034674\windows10.0-kb4034674-x86_277929e9393c8566e74eb72037bc7fd29cc6b406.msu

11 Now we want to save the changes and 'unmount' the image, using this command. This should leave an updated install.wim file in C:\Temp

Code:

Dism /Unmount-Image /MountDir:C:\Temp\Mount /Commit

12 The original installer used a install.esd file, so I converted the WIM file back to ESD using the following command. The SourceIndex value is from step 8 again. Perhaps the installer would have worked with a install.wim file (?) but I didn't want to risk it.

Code:

DISM /Export-Image /SourceImageFile:C:\Temp\install.wim /SourceIndex:1 /DestinationImageFile:C:\Temp\install.esd /compress:recovery /CheckIntegrity

13 Now we should have a new install.esd file in C:\Temp. So we can use File Explorer (yes, you can use that again now) to copy that to the \sources folder on the USB drive and overwrite the \sources\install.esd file. Note that the original file contained multiple editions of Windows but we've made this version specific to just one edition, so you may want to keep the original install.esd for use on other machines.

14 Cross your fingers and use the USB drive to attempt a clean install.

while the KB4034674 CU for v1703 made the Broadcom 440x device work properly under the 1703 release, the fix has been included in the 1709 and 1803 releases .