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."

Comments

Kudos!

[Friar_MJK]

Great job MS! Now look everybody, even the big corporations can do something good. Personally, I don't want to hear a single MS bashing post in this thread (even though I know that's impossible on /.) This isn't a perfect world, and as such, it's reasonable to expect some counter-thoughts the matter, but for the love of jeebus, let's keep the bashing to a minimal, shall we?

Re:'Long overdue'...or 'same shit, different day'?

[Wabbit Wabbit]

I don't think that it's necessarily reasonable to expect Microsoft to go through and completely thoroughly analyze the code of every certified device driver to ensure that they're all playing nicely.

When I'm paying for the OS (and paying a lot for it) yes, yes I do.

You can't expect any sort of software to perform flawlessy right out of the gate, and this is a convenient way of monitoring a driver's reliability

That's why you have a beta period for the OS. That's exactly what Microsoft is supposed to be doing with their time and money. Perhaps they should be spending more of both. Oh wait, it's already been how many years and how many [m|b]illions of dollars?

I'm in software development, and no, I don't expect it all to work perfectly out of the gate. But they can certainly do far better than they have. Besides doing more/better beta testing in the OS, they could offer some better incentives to the hardware vendors to improve their beta cycles. Perhaps even monetary incentives. With all the cash Microsoft is sitting on, they should be deploying it to making the OS better. Again, that's why we pay for that POS to begin with.