S
Stephen Sprunk
Paul Gunson said:but won't a lot of drivers still be the responsibility of third party
manufacturers? or will all the new 64 bit drivers appearing on places
like planetAMD be part of the new beta...? if not how else can MS make
any significant improvements.... i mean the OS does work quite well but
most of the 3rd party drivers are crap... or is it MS
Microsoft has a long history of writing drivers for popular hardware on
behalf of the vendors. Back in Sep 2003 when the public trial version was
built, this driver list was extremely limited; presumably Microsoft's goal
was to get people testing the OS itself, particularly WOW64, but not the
drivers themselves.
GPU drivers are still in pretty sad shape, though ATI and nVIDIA have made
great strides recently. Most other major vendors have shipped beta drivers,
and it's safe to assume Microsoft will enhance those, plus write their own
drivers for equipment from less-cooperative or defunct vendors, and run them
all through WHQL before the final release of XP64. IMHO that's the major
holdup in the release process...
Since beta participants are under NDA, it's hard to say what the exact
status of all this is; we'll get a better picture if/when Microsoft releases
a new public trial.
i was shocked to learn that it still required a floppy drive to install
XP-64.
That's only needed if you need additional drivers during install (e.g.
SATA); alternately, users can modify the installation ISO to include
additional drivers, but it's not for the faint of heart...
S