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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."
The very first thing I thought of was CD copy protection schemes. Many of them install "drivers" that disallow copying and such. Once these are ported to Vista, and they will be, will these be open to feedback? Who wants to bet that Microsoft will roll over and allow some drivers to be "immutable"?
This could be one of the greatest things ever, or another huge disappointment.
Actually I believe it's you submitting bug reports for hardware that microsoft doesn't controll, doesn't create drivers for and isn't distributed by them. What you paid microsoft for were the ones that come from microsoft, but you can't really claim that you are paying microsoft to be their beta tester when you download a new . So I'm not quite sure what your beef is... other than to possibly anti-m$ karma-whore a bit.
You know, I don't really mind testing Linux drivers...but when it comes to an OS I have to shell out money for, I kinda expect it to work.
I can already see it, HP taking the top scores in their cheap multifuncionals and printers.The drivers are being written by OEM and non-Microsoft affiliates. It is unreasonable to think that it is Microsoft's responsability to test and debug third party drivers.
My other OS is the MCP!
Thousands of Vista drivers won't come out until AFTER the operating system ships, and they are written by third parties. Other than guaranteeing that they are bascially functional, Microsoft cannot possibly test every driver for bugs and incompatibilities with every other driver or piece of software. This at least gives users a way to provide feedback about poor quality drivers. This is typical anti-MS bashing. It's so incredibly obvious that the OP though hard about how he could take this announcement the worst way humanly possible. Congratulations... you're right... trying to fix a problem is, in fact, an admission that there *is* a problem. And UI improvements just go to show how poor the XP UI is, and kernel improvements just go to show how unstable Windows is... etc... etc... Don't you ever get tired of whining?
The article clearly refers to OEM written drivers, not MS written drivers. So if you install Vista and don't install any additional drivers, then you can definately expect that to work. If you now install the latest Creative and ATI drivers. You can submit crash reports to MS if those drivers fail. As for the old crash system. OEMs still get crash reports, but there was no incentive for them to fix bad drivers. Now, if they don't fix their drivers, MS will revoke their WHQL status and cannot advertise that they are compliant with Vista. I don't know enough about the system to say whether they have checks in place to prevent abuse.
...and this doesn't solve the problem. The WinTel and LinTel communities have decided, with their pocketbook, that they want "choice", which means a jillion different CPUs, chipsets, video cards, sound devices, network devices, USB and FireWire ports - the list goes on and on. The mere thought of testing relevant combinations/permutations of this makes my skin crawl. Yes, a good driver architecture would help, but hey, if your video card fails, who cares if it takes your system down - your system _is_ down without video.
What we really need are some standard reference models for PCs, and (this is critical) we need hardware manufacturers to stop treating driver interfaces as intellectual property and completely, totally OPEN their interface for software developers. Of course, like I said above, people vote with their pocketbook, and people don't seem to get that worked up about this. They'll continue to buy nVidia or ATI or whoever because the cards really do have great performance, and they'll just suffer with the problems that come with proprietary interfaces. I mean, it's amazing to me - when I buy hardware, it should be OPEN. What you did under the hood is one thing, but how the system interfaces with it - OPEN. My old retro computers came with SCHEMATICS, for crying out loud.
OK, I'm off my soapbox. Just don't think that the driver world will get any better this way, because it won't. Until we're dealing with known, documented hardware and a more elegant driver architecture, a crashin' we will go.
My comments are my own, and do not represent the views of my employer, my spouse, my children, or my cats.
(I'm a university IT tech.)
I've been configuring computers to use the crap OEM wireless config utilities, only because MS's util is even worse. In particular, MS's tool doesn't show a list of all the WAPs in range; instead, it will just pick one for you.
I wish I didn't have to do this, especially on newer Dell Latitudes. With those (can't remember if these particular ones have Dell or Intel wireless) a big popup comes up every couple fscking minutes alerting you that there's a WAP nearby, wouldn't you like to connect? Now, you can turn off the onboard wireless with a physical switch, but that's different from how everyone else does it, so lusers must be Edjumicated. At least I don't deal with PhDs, heh.
Hail Eris, full of mischief...
E pluribus sanguinem