Ya right....I had the "opportunity" to wait a year for Vista compatible drivers for my sound card.
I also had the "opportunity" to spend a couple of days messing with printer drivers that were supposedly Vista compatible, that wouldn't work for anything.
It was amazing that as soon as I went back to XP, all my stuff worked !!
Windows XP, An OS that's uhm, 7 years old, Vista, An Os that's about 2 ... Hmmmm which do YOU think is more mature?
I'm not making excuses for the lack of driver support for VISTA but. Since WHEN is it the
responsibility of the OS Manufacturer to produce drivers for the many millions of hardware devices out there? MS does a fantastic job of providing the basic drivers for MOST hardware but asking them to make optimized drivers for all the different hardware devices that are out there is being a little unrealistic.
If the hardware manufacturers want to SELL their hardware, they'd better provide DECENT drivers for the operating systems their audience is using.
While I'm on it, the state of driver development out there today is just beyond
pathetic.
HP Drivers take 15-20 minutes to load and quit eating 90+% of the CPU after a cold boot on my wife's Dual CPU 2.4 GHz 2GB RAM Windows XP SP3 PC. Is that REALLY Microsoft's fault? Not a chance people. that's HP's fault. And, why are the Drivers for her MFC Printer 238 MB
Why are Logitech MOUSE drivers (SETPOINT 4.7) 60 Megs
That's INSANE!!
AMD buys out ATI and suddenly ATI's drivers just SUCK. CCC throws 15+ exceptions / second on that SAME PC. I've gone back to 6.9 catalyst drivers that actually perform MUCH better than ay of the driver releases since for her 9800 Pro.
These are but 3 examples. I have thousands more at client sites all over the Denver Metro Area and the Colorado Front Range. And I do have to say that IF all those drivers worked without issue, I'd probably be out work. BUT, be that as it may I find it UNACCEPTABLE that everyone blames Microsoft for these CRAPPY drivers. Microsoft has released a VERY nice Driver Development Kit (compare that to writing drivers in Leopard or Linux!!) with VERY well laid out RULES ABOUT what is and is NOT accetable in driver development under their operating systems. And, all these hardware manufacturers do as LITTLE as possible to get their hardware to "WORK" under whatever operating system they're targeting and nearly everyone on the planet blames Microsoft for the problems and issues that arise from purely LAZY Manufacturers and Driver Authors.
Bottom line though is that of ALL the operating systems I've used over my nearly 40 years in the computer industry, Microsoft provides the MOST drivers for the MOST number of harware products out there. AND, you get those OUT OF THE BOX not having to hunt some source code line down only to have to COMPILE it then figure out where to install it THEN to find that you have the Rev 2 product not the Rev 1! and it just won't work
AND - is it Microsoft's fault that my PC under Windows XP SP3 will REBOOT when I fire up VPC 2007 SP1? The stack trace (obtained via WinDBG) CLEARLY shows it was VIA's fault with their HD Audio driver trying to call IRQ 0 with NULLS!!
I think not!