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Microsoft Begs Hardware Makers To Take Support Seriously

Posted by samzenpus on from the cry-me-a-river dept.

Banana ricotta pancakes writes "Microsoft has confirmed that there will be a widespread public beta of Windows 7 in early 2009, while urging device manufacturers to start immediate testing with its pre-beta release to avoid the widespread hardware compatibility problems that contributed so much to the negative perception of Vista. 'There is not another WinHEC planned before Windows 7 is released,' Microsoft has warned them. Better hope that testing goes well."

3 of 543 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Why bother? by QuantumG · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Maybe Microsoft should do what the Linux community does. Work with manufacturers to get the drivers written and then maintain the drivers for the manufacturers forever.

    Ya, that's likely.

    BTW - I own two webcams now. Neither work under Windows since I lost the driver disk (and those drivers were useless under XP64/Vista anyway), but they both work just fine under Linux. What's the world coming to?!

    --
    How we know is more important than what we know.
  2. Standards by PhrostyMcByte · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Nearly 2009 and we still can't plug in a printer and have it just work. The idea that any printer - consumer or professional - needs proprietary drivers that might have problems with Windows 7 is really sad. We need more standard HID devices, and better HID support in OSes.

    1. Re:Standards by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Interesting

      HID is a double edge sword. Take USB Mass Storage as an example, if there wasn't one, we might have file system tailor made for Flash memory now.
      But now Mass Storage expose everything in simple linear blocks..., it's just not possible.

      Well, I know the price might probably be much higher with much low adoption rate without Mass Storage HID...

      Talking about Printer, there are actually PostScript standard which work reasonably well, except that you will lost some bells and whistles like Printer maintenance stuff. Microsoft also wants to push its XPS standard, which might be a good HID support candidates.