Microsoft Begs Hardware Makers To Take Support Seriously

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."

Comments

Or...

[emptycorp]

They could just update Vista to actually be compatible with all devices and release the "upgrades" as an update as it should be, not be the money-grubbing whores they are.

Re:Seems to me like a bit of a role reversal

[it0]

I agree, unfortunatley they all switched to XP :( with new releases of the hardware. The linux option is becoming more and more rare.

Re:Seems to me like a bit of a role reversal

[ultranova]

The eeePC showed that linux works fine as a preinstalled OS. Its driver structure doesn't change every release in an unpredictable way.

Yes it does. If your driver isn't included in the kernel source tree, it will stop working at random releases as some API is removed or changed. This is true even for drivers distributed entirely in source form; for binary drivers it is nothing short of a nightmare.

This is an especially large problem for video cards. For other components, you can pick ones Linux has in-kernel support for, but there is not a single decent 3D card included in that list. Add the fact that NVIDIAs newer drivers have dropped support for legacy cards, and I'm apparently forced to upgrade my machine if there's a critical kernel bug.