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Microsoft to Turn to Driver Quality Ratings System
QT writes "Ars Technica is reporting that Microsoft is finally trying to do something about PC driver problems. A new crash-report-driven Driver Quality Rating system will be used in Windows Vista to rate drivers. Drivers that rate poorly in real world use by users will lose their logo certification status, which would be bad news for OEMs and the device manufacturers themselves. Maybe now submitting crash reports will feel more useful? This is long overdue."
When I installed a SATA drive and started booting off it my win2k install's stability when down the tubes.
For the record I'm using a ECS KT-600A mobo with a VIA VT8237 sata raid controller.
I'm running Vista Beta 2 now on the same box with a driver from Microsoft and it is more stable then Win2k was with VIA's SATA driver.
Now that is sad.
Does Microsoft need to be doing more to ensure the quality of the drivers running on their operating system? You bet.
You must not have used windows in a while. Even if a single program crashes, and not the OS, you have the option to send in crash reports, for that program. This is what the GP was talking about.
Philosophy.
I believe (I could be wrong) that the certification involves only certifies adherence to the published api, it doesn't certify quality of driver code. What a driver does or how it does it doesn't matter only how it gives the result of it's work back to the OS.
Good point, except that history doesn't back you up. Microsoft has always gone out of its way to blame drivers or 3rd-party software for its own quality / stability problems.
Remember, Microsoft is one of the most hated companies for a reason ... they didn't get that way overnight. It took a couple of decades of abuse, and its going to take a couple of decades to win people back ... if they ever start making an honest effort to. Just look at the LIES on open document standards wrt Massachussetts (or however you spell it ... I'm from Kanadanadanada ^W up north! :-)
The driver company doesn't need the source code to the OS to "build a proper driver". Indeed, it's far more likely to end up with a *worse* driver that depends on undocumented features and/or breaks with every minor OS revision if they *do* have the source code.
I think you're over-reacting just a bit...
... what? ... dozens of reasons? Hundreds? Is MS going to pore over _all_ this data, identify actual driver problems? OR just send blanket data to OEM and say, "OK, you've lost your certification. Sorry it didn't work out. You'll have to find out why your driver crashes, here are the 7,500 reports. Have a nice day."
1. It presumes the problem is faulty driver coding. Does it take into account other applications open at the time? What about tricky conflicts? I've been around enough to see MANY applications that kill drivers, like Word causing video driver crashes. Who's fault?
Yes, it does account for other applications open at the time. If you look at the data that will be sent to Microsoft, you will see (among other things) a process list. That aside, drivers shouldn't crash, regardless of any requests that applications may make of them. If an application is causing a driver to crash, the driver probably missed a bounds check, screwed up its state machine, or who knows. Something that should be caught and handled, in any case.
2. Will Microsoft pore over all this data? Drivers crash for
3. Will the data contain enough information for the OEM, who really gets a bunch of MS-formatted data, get enough real information to solve the problem?
These two questions contradict each other. In #2, you say that there will be too much information. In #3, you are worried that there won't be enough. Which is it? Either way, you should take a look at the contents of an error report sometime; they are quite detailed, just not in plain english. From those 7,500 crash reports, there are definitely going to be some common function pointers that the driver developers can use to look up the offending functions, their arguments, and the state of the other registers on the machine. While the information looks cryptic to the average user, it is very useful to those who can map that hexidecimal data to source code.
4. According to TFA, this only works on the "Premium" edition of Vista. In that version, drivers have to be certified. If "Premium" proves to not be a best-seller, how many OEMs will bother with certification? I still have to click through "non-certified" dialogues in XP today.
Certification does more than just avoid the silly "non-certified" dialog box. Certification isn't cheap; companies who spend the money to go through the certification process have at least shown some commitment to driver quality by getting a third-party to verify best practices. I believe that getting your driver certified also allows you to use the "Certified for Windows" logo on your product, which (probably) has some sway with customers.
In particular, MS's tool doesn't show a list of all the WAPs in range
I don't know which MS OS your university uses, but XP certainly does. If you connect to one of the WAPs then the next time you boot it will try to automatically reconnect to the same one, but you can still get the list from the MS util. I agree with you about the 'WAP nearby' message, that is annoying if you've got no intention of connecting to one - it even pops up when you've already got a wired connection, which seems pretty dumb.
It is estimated that Microsoft receives over 400,000 crash dumps in OCA daily across XP, Server 2003, and Vista. Thats 400,000 blue screens people! And all those minidumps and sysdata.xml files are stored in a SQL database. Crazy! It turns out that the vast majority of the crashes are due to Chinese malware and known issues that already have fixes. Guess what, people don't update their shit. The rest are genuine bugs either in Microsoft code or 3rd party driver code.
:)
H .mspx and you can request a link to download the tool by emailing grphstab@microsoft.com (Graphics Stability alias)
OEM's like Dell and HP have access to this raw OCA data through contracts with Microsoft and they have the power to determine which hardware vendors are the most reliable based on install base and crash rate. Want to know whether ATI or nVidia display hardware is more reliable for a business desktop? Ask a Dell TAM. Or better yet, just look and see what video cards Dell puts in their most popular high-end systems. When folks crash, they either call up Dell support and Dell loses money, or they call up Microsoft support and Microsoft loses money. Dell and Microsoft want to prevent those calls! If they can reduce support calls due to Video crashes on systems by switching from nVidia to ATI or vice versa, millions of dollars can be saved! The customer being happier is a nice side benifit
Speaking of Display hardware, have you guys heard of CRASH? Graphcis drivers are notorious for crashing and account for about one in five of all crashes reported to OCA! MS developed a neat multi-threading stress tool to compare the reliablity of various video cards. The whitepaper has been available since Apr 30, 2004 at http://www.microsoft.com/whdc/DevTools/tools/CRAS
Ehm, you can:
Alas, I do not know what effect disabling iPodService has. Back when I tried it, it wasn't a real service. I had no iPod either (I only have a Shuffle anyway). For me, I leave both processes running: they do absolutely nothing to my systems stability. They both eat up about 3.5MiBytes according to Windows Task Manager. That's peanuts when you have over 1Gig RAM or more (as nearly all my systems do...)
Ahhh...the great dumpster continuum. Many a free computer will be found there. -- sowth (748135)