Microsoft Reveals Vista SP1 Driver Installation Failure Rates
One
of the common problems when Windows Vista was released was that of
missing or non-working drivers. Microsoft massively reworked many of
Windows' internal systems and frameworks, meaning lots of drivers
broke, with most of them needing major work, and some even needed to be
rewritten completely. Apparently, Microsoft didn't communicate this
well enough with its hardware partners - or the partners were lazy, who
knows - because many devices failed to work with Vista during its early
months of being out in the wild. Microsoft is trying to keep this story
from repeating itself, saying that everything that works on Vista
should work on Windows 7. To gain a little more insight into this
problem, Microsoft gave out some very interesting figures regarding driver installation failure rates.
One
of the common problems when Windows Vista was released was that of
missing or non-working drivers. Microsoft massively reworked many of
Windows' internal systems and frameworks, meaning lots of drivers
broke, with most of them needing major work, and some even needed to be
rewritten completely. Apparently, Microsoft didn't communicate this
well enough with its hardware partners - or the partners were lazy, who
knows - because many devices failed to work with Vista during its early
months of being out in the wild. Microsoft is trying to keep this story
from repeating itself, saying that everything that works on Vista
should work on Windows 7. To gain a little more insight into this
problem, Microsoft gave out some very interesting figures regarding driver installation failure rates.The below figures come from Microsoft's Online Crash Analysis and Customer Experience Improvement Program tools, and show the success/failure rates of driver installations during September 2008, on Windows Vista with Service Pack 1 installed.
These figures are interesting, but at the same time, a tad bit
on the useless side of things because there's no way to make any
comparisons. How does this compare to Windows XP? Windows Vista
pre-SP1? Ubuntu? OpenSUSE? Please note that we are talking driver installations
here, so drivers that are already part of the base OS are not taken
into account. Microsoft has stated that anything above 3% is not good.
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