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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."
They must provide specs.
Good for them to try to do something like this, but will it work? After all, aren't all major PC manufacturers generally shipping parts by good companies (ATI, nVidia, Creative, Intel, etc.)? I'm not sure this will do much there, but for the end user market it may be quite a bit better. The only question is how you would rate all those companies that sell nVidia cards and just repackage the drivers. Do they get nVidia's rating since it's their driver, or do they get a lower one since they take longer to package updates?
Driver manufacturers can't exactly be trusted though. Read this story I found today on a MS weblog.
I know the modem in my computer is necessary for boot-up.
Comment forecast: Bits of genius surrounded by a sea of mediocrity.
How will they submit crash reports if it's the NIC driver that's hosed?
Also how long before some hardware company resorts to spyware tactics so people can't click the "submit crash report" button?
I will give bad feedback to all vendors that develop drivers which aren't standard / poorly integrated with the OS.
This include any driver which add a tray icon app. Do we realy need that each wireless card vendor bundle its own wireless configuration software?
Yes, I know you don't have to use it, but most people think they do. Try to explain to the average joe why there is TWO icons displaying the status of his wireless connection. Or that changing the color settings of the monitor depends on the video card driver.
When I bought my cheap 3.5'' USB SD/CF card reader, I didn't know that it needed a special software to work. At last in Vista I will be able to mod them -1 bad driver.
How do we know that some idiot end users aren't just going to get mad at their drivers and file a complaint when their machine can't run the latest FPS any higher than 60 frames per second? Or how can we be sure that nVidia users won't go gang bang ATI's driver ratings or vice versa?
I think that it's a good idea to have developers rate drivers, because serious developers should know whether or not the drivers are bad, or if their own code is what is causing problems.
I think that it's stupid to open this up to end users.
When it comes to this sort of thing, they think that they know a lot, but in reality, they really don't.
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.
But they're already certified by Microsoft, which is supposed to mean something. Since they're asking you to submit bug reports on drivers they've already certified, it makes you wonder just what the point of driver certification is, if not to ensure driver quality.
No, most drivers are written by 3rd parties. And exactly how are these involuntary? They are user-submitted!
Go read up on Watson and see how many times it has been cited as being one of the main drivers of improvement of MS products. By your logic any new version of any new software is an admission that the old one didn't work.
Good point, I guess we'll see, but I imagine there will be some kind of fraud detection. This is a similar issue to the one of click fraud with any major search engine
Improved quality of drivers is not good news? Umm hmm
The exclusive provider of the good driver list: search.msn.com
Do you really care if your music CD has a "Vista Compatible" logo on it?
Thought not.
This is different for say, a network card. THAT you would care about.
So, the RIAA types can do as they very well please with their driver malware seeing as it has zero impact on them if they lose a rating they never really had in the first place.
I work for the Department of Redundancy Department.
This seems like more shortsighted tomfoolery on Microsoft's part.
Sure, for performance reasons it may be advantageous to let a driver have free access to the hardware. But I don't see any logical reason why it has to be that way... just as I don't see any law of physics that says memory leaks and buffer overruns are unavoidable.
But, why, exactly, should a faulty display driver, say, cause any fundamental problems? Why doesn't the operating system intervene? Why shouldn't a driver malfunction just cause a brief screen flicker... followed by the OS detecting that something improper has happened, followed by a driver and hardware reset, continue merrily on its way? Yes, I do recognize that a driver that is directly fundamental to a system's own operation--specifically a disk driver--is likely to be more difficult. Still, disk drives are fundamentally unreliable at the analog level, but layers of CRC checking and bad sector remapping hide the problems almost completely. Why couldn't this be true at the disk driver level? So that a bum driver causes only a performance loss and some retries, not total disaster?
As with so much of modern PC practice, this seems to be a case of "because we've always done it that way." It is convenient for Microsoft to point fingers elsewhere, but in the final analysis they are responsible for the user experience. Instead of painting a scarlet letter on bad drivers, why don't they design the OS to tolerate them better?
"How to Do Nothing," kids activities, back in print!
No. The feedback you're providing to Microsoft is not on a whim. They're not basing driver quality ratings on how many angry E-mails they've received; they're basing them on how many automated Windows Error Reporting messages they receive, which drivers are the most common offenders, and whether or not these drivers are all experiencing similar failures.
Ever used Microsoft's "Crash Analysis" tool? These Crash Analysis reports are what they're using to guage driver quality. If you've never used the tool, take a look. It's very handy for figuring out exactly why you're getting a BSOD when you insert your El-Cheapo Brand-Y USB Modem. http://oca.microsoft.com/
hello dear sirs my name is jamesh i are india (bihar) can u guide me install red had linux 9?
so if i'm a user of peripheral 'x' who *doesn't* have crashes, just how do i get counted towards the 'non-crashing' systems ratio? unless windows now sends device ids of *everything* plugged in at *any* time to my computer regardless of any crash reports... or is it a voluntary process, in which case vendors will now have to rely on people submitting hardware details to microsoft just because they 'feel like it' to avoid losing certification... hmm...
If it was almost anyone else, there wouldn't be any argument. History, in the sense that Microsoft has always worked to blame others (Lotus, Corel, Netscape, so many printer manufacturers) for problems that are caused by Microsoft policies, works against trusting them:
Like I said, anyone else, this wouldn't be an issue. But they LIE so many times. Look at the latest spyware - the WGA tool that phones home every day, and all the lies they told about it, and continue to tell about it. This is someone you'd trust?
I don't know if anyone else has had this problem, but at the moment Window Update driver recomendation sucks.
I've never updated my computer drivers via Windows Update. My boss recently asked me why and I showed him on a spare laptop we had.
First of all, Windows kept saying that there where updated drivers for the onboard Realtek AC97 sound card. Problem was, the updated drivers where for the C-Media AC97 drivers. The sound card didn't work when I updated them to the ones Windows recommended.
Then (the big one) Windows kept saying there was an updated driver for the USB mouse I was using (A A-Open Optical Openeye Wheelmouse). The driver it recommended was a A4-Tech driver or something.
Oh boy, did I have fun after that was installed.
I installed the recommended mouse driver and restarted. Instant blue-screen. So I tried to get into safe mode to rollback the driver. Blue screen while booting into safe mode. So now I have to try and recover (or reformat) this laptop due to a dodgey windows update.
My boss was amazed at what Windows Update had done. Why does Windows say there are updated drivers available that don't work? I know better than to trust WU for drivers, but I still have the average home user coming up to me asking why their computer has gone bad after loading the latest windows updates (I tell everyone who asks, only use WU for the critical windows updates, that's all)
Who is to blame for this? The average computer user has no idea what devices are in their computer (Hell, most of them still call the moniter the computer and the computer "the box"). Why does Windows seem to ignore what's listed as installed and working in Device Manager?
This space for rent
When you're trying to write a closed-source driver which interfaces to a closed-source kernel, and you have only incomplete and incorrect API documentation at your disposal, it doesn't take a genius to see that it's going to {to use a technical term} go Tango Uniform.
There is only one solution to the whole driver issue, and that is for it to be made law that driver software source code must be made available -- otherwise, the hardware can't legally be sold.
It's already technically illegal for manufacturers to keep this information secret anyway, since the rightful owner of a piece of hardware is by definition privy to any secret that it may embody. But in these paranoid times, when everybody is concerned about bogus "intellectual property", they won't change their ways without legislation. The fact is that their near competitors are already probing their products pretty severely. And they've got better-equipped labs than the average Fred in the Shed.
I'd also incorporate a "reasonable force" provision, granting anybody the explicit right to publish the results of reverse-engineering {which I consider to be a forcible technique, although less so than kidnapping the CEO's daughter demanding the driver source code for a ransom} that they may have conducted on hardware that they own in the event that the manufacturer illegally refuses to co-operate. The onus would be upon the manufacturer to demonstrate that a more benign method existed for obtaining the relevant information.
Needless to say, this would benefit all operating systems, not just Windows.
Je fume. Tu fumes. Nous fûmes!
As previously reported before on slashdot (too lazy to references), the Microsoft Anti-spyware software uses the same kind of community ratings, and crazy ratings were observed too (some spyware were slowly declassified as spyware, because users kept clicking on OK, just to have their software work).
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
Except that it's not legally possible in many cases.
If you expose the functionality of Bob's wireless ethernet card, some asshole is going to write a driver that allows it to send signals over illegal frequencies. Then Bob Wireless Company gets sued by some other company whose product is getting interfered with. Now, it might be possible for the hardware maker to prevent that by making the hardware 'smarter,' but then they have to make a different version for every region (France uses different frequencies than the US, for example) and costs go way up.
Then there's things like the mpeg codec used in video capture cards, which might be patented, and other things like that.
What you could recommend is basically what Apple's been doing for years: Get hardware makers to use the standard USB interfaces. Digital cameras should always show up as "generic mass storage device" when you plug in the USB cable... it's ridiculous to have to install Canon's crappy-ass photo software just to copy files. Ditto with my USB-enabled cellphone... why should I have to pay $30 for Motorola Phone Tools to transfer MP3s and images to (what amounts to) a memory card?
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