Need A Win10 Driver For A Cysco Am10 Internet Adapter

Cysco stopped supporting this adapter and it worked just fine till they did. Any ideas?

 

If Cisco/Linksys offers no driver for the device, AM10, which appeared in 2011, it's time to buy hardware that Windows 10 supports.

https://www.linksys.com/us/support-product?pid=01t80000003K7fhAAC
Compatibility with Windows 10, scroll to the bottom.
https://www.linksys.com/us/support-article?articleNum=165475

Indicates end of life, obsolete
https://www.linksys.com/us/support-article?articleNum=291976
12 item under model.

 

I agree. Since it is up to hardware manufacturers to develop and maintain current drivers for operating systems, short of developing your own (rarely cost effective), it is generally necessary to upgrade the hardware. This is just a fact of life when it comes to ever advancing high tech electronics. We are always getting rid of perfectly good hardware before it dies. Remember 8-tracks? Cassettes? Reel-to-reel? CRT TVs and monitors? AGP graphics cards? EIDE hard drives?

 

The old driver shouldn't cause everything to just stop working, should it?
Even though updates have flown south?
Have you upgraded your OS or something of a kind?

And yes, there is a line when hardware must be considered.

 

That's not how it works though. Drivers interact with the operating system through mutual support of various "industry standard" protocols. If the code in the operating system changes and now requires drivers to work in a different way (as they do correctly with more modern hardware), or if the operating system no longer supports protocols that went obsolete and were superseded long ago, then support for that legacy hardware stops.

It is not fair to expect operating systems to maintain support for hardware that no longer meets current industry standards. While it is true Microsoft has a big say in how the standards work, they do not dictate everything. This is especially true with networking protocols where major "global" companies from many aspects of networking must comply with the exact same standards. Remember, Apple, Intel, Cisco, Sun, and a host of other major corporations work together to develop these standards and protocols.

Also, it is not like Microsoft springs these changes on everyone out of the blue. Except for "zero day exploits" (newly discovered critical security vulnerabilities that must be patched yesterday, if not sooner), these changes are available to the hardware industry (and consumers through the Insider programs) well before they actually go out through normal Windows Update channels.

So again, if the hardware maker refused to update the drivers on this old hardware and make them available to their customers, that's on the hardware makers, not the OS makers. And notice I've been saying operating system"s" and OS maker"s" - Windows is not the only OS and Microsoft is not the only OS maker this hardware must work with!