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Microsoft to Turn to Driver Quality Ratings System

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the four-stars dept.

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."

4 of 333 comments (clear)

  1. Is this the end of CD DRM drivers? by mentaldrano · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.

    1. Re:Is this the end of CD DRM drivers? by StillAnonymous · · Score: 5, Insightful

      The worst thing about those types of drivers is that they are deliberately made to be very difficult to reverse engineer. So if you start seeing bugs and crashes in them, you can't even take a look to see what's going on (unless you have a LOT of patience).

      So what will probably happen is this: StarFor... oops, I mean "Generic copy-protection driver #3" crashes for some unknown reason. Copy-protection vendor's response? Oh, it was probably due to bad hardware or due to another copy-protection companies buggy driver interfering with our perfectly coded one. But you won't be able to verify their claim since the driver resists debugging and is encrypted!

      So it's par for the course in this situation.

  2. Re:'Long overdue'...or 'same shit, different day'? by InsaneGeek · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.

  3. You don't make any sense by bwoodring · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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?