Hardware Analysis - Re: Vista driver woes, update or upgrade?

Re: Re: Vista driver woes, update or upgrade?

Gerritt — 2007-03-27T01:17:54-05:00

Bobby,
It is my hope that I didn't do anything to your oatmeal.
I still have issues with my present GPU implementation.

Gerritt

Re: Re: Vista driver woes, update or upgrade?

dark41 — 2007-03-26T17:24:54-05:00

Maybe that's why I qualified my statement with "that I know of".

We've used mainly Gigabyte and Intel boards (high to medium end) since SATA was available without a problem. We also used a few Asus boards (all high end, for our own systems), 1 MSI (that was 1 too many, don't ask) 1 DFI (again 1 too many and again don't ask ) and 1 Abit (only because that's when they started having problems and weren't sure if they'd be around for support). I too, have never had to install drivers for an SATA drive.

Re: Re: Vista driver woes, update or upgrade?

DublinGunner — 2007-03-26T15:36:00-05:00

dark41 said:

XP never required drivers via F6 for SATA that I know of. XP required drivers for large hard drives (137g and up) of both SATA and ATA/IDE until SP2 corrected that.

Well, never isnt quite true. It really depends on the mobo. I for one have never had to install SATA drivers on loading for XP, never. But some people had to.

Re: Re: Vista driver woes, update or upgrade?

Bitmap — 2007-03-26T14:39:06-05:00

Thank you for not p**sing in my oatmeal, Gerritt.

Re: Re: Vista driver woes, update or upgrade?

dark41 — 2007-03-26T13:12:52-05:00

I'm not anti-FDD, although it would be nice to have CD/DVD support for F6. I'd prefer USB flash drives and/or removeable drive support though.

Don't feel bad Gerritt. One of my discs was diplaying "error" in the RAID array, although it was still bootable. I spent hours making images of both XP and Vista drives with Acronis, deleted the RAID array and recreated it, only to find that my images were both faulty anyway. Here we go from scratch again.

Re: Re: Vista driver woes, update or upgrade?

Gerritt — 2007-03-26T02:21:59-05:00

Dark41,
I agree with most of what you said.
IF MS is to require a F6 install of drivers to work, shouldn't they support loading off of CD/DVD?

Tonight, I made a change in BIOS that blew my sysem away.....One long and three short beeps. I had to reinstall my old GPU and then install my new one, even after a BIOS reset.

Caca ocurres! (this is the greatest T-Shirt that I've ever seen on a 2 year old).
Because it is true that SH|T happens!

How we get around it, is what makes it worthwhile.

Gerritt

Re: Re: Vista driver woes, update or upgrade?

dark41 — 2007-03-25T05:47:16-05:00

Its all really no big deal to me Garrett. I'm so used to formatting my system because of hardware upgrades and testing different components that its like part of my normal work week anymore. I just need to get it all working correctly so I can image all partitions and save myself the hassle of doing it manually.

I loaded the MB chipset, LAN, and vid drivers, all are the latest updates from Gigabyte's site, and rebooted after each one, no audio drivers for the MB. Then did Vista updates, and rebooted. I had no sound at that time, and everything else was working fine. Then I installed the AC '97 drivers. When the installation finished, I got the popup to reboot the system, and it froze. Upon hitting reset, the OS was corrupt. A scandisk was run, and it deleted half of the OS. When it tried to copy back the new files, it errored saying there was not enough disc space to install the files, and quit the scandisk. This put me into a loop, where it tried to scandisk at boot, but couldn't load the files. Had to reformat as last known good configuration and safe mode didn't work either. Having UAC turned off often gives me the 'not enough disc space' to install files/program error. But since I couldn't get back to the desktop, I couldn't turn UAC back on for the scandisk to work correctly. No idea if scandisk would have gotten the OS working correctly if UAC been turned on, but I have no doubt whatsoever that installing the AC '97 drivers in this fashion caused the corrupt OS.

If I loaded the MB drivers prior to 3-16-07 from Gigabyte, I had 2 channel stereo sound, and no option for turning on 5.1 on the Realtek and SigmaTel software. This has been corrected with the new AC8888 drivers for Realtek. Although half the features are missing, at least I now have 5.1 on Vista Business 32 bit. I still haven't tried the old Realtek MB audio drivers and then the AC '97 drivers though.

Maybe my understanding of these drivers isn't what it should be. Seems to me that the Realtek audio drivers should replace the MB audio drivers, not be an addition to them? I don't understand how MB audio drivers would be any different from what's found on the audio manufacturer's website.

I don't know about 100g SATA drives as I've never seen one, but every 80g and 120g SATA drive that I've ever installed XP to on SP1 or SP2 has worked without drivers, unless I was running a RAID array. Anything over 137g required drivers on SP1, but not on SP2, for both SATA and ATA HDDs. I've built 100s of systems over the past 2 years, and this has always been the case.

Here's a short list of what drivers I'd expect to be covered on the OS during installation:
SATA drivers
RAID drivers
basic video drivers (to support any vid card, onboard graphics, and monitor)
audio drivers per MB chipset
LAN drivers per MB chipset
Basic printer interface drivers
keyboard/mouse (usb and ps2)
optical drive drivers and floppy (although if all of the above drivers are inlcuded, the FDD becomes unnecessary)

The rest of 3rd party drivers I'd expect to come from the 3rd party websites. Even then, MS should have worked more closely with hardware/software manufacturers to make sure Vista was released ready to go with as many of these manufacturers as possible.

Now you think about it, and really there are only a dozen or less different chipsets that will work well today with Vista, including both AMD and Intel boards. Many of the different chipsets use the same audio and video hardware too. And MS is most of the way there already with basic driver support for Vista. The only real problem I've had is with the audio and printer. (Although Vista found and identified our Canon MP830, it required drivers to be installed separately to use it. No biggy there as the Canon drivers have been ready for quite some time.)

SATA/RAID: The drivers for SATA and RAID are tiny, and there's not much to choose from.

Graphics: There's 4 different Nvidia card series including the onboard series. ATI has 4 series including the onboard series.

Audio: For Intel audio drivers, anything less than ICH6 isn't worth worrying about (because the CPU is too slow to run Vista well) and a couple Nvidia 6xxi chipsets. There's 4(?) main audio manufacturers installing hardware to these chipset boards, and only a couple versions of each that are reasonably expected to run Vista. AMD is a little more complicated because of all the various chipset manufacturers (Nvidia, VIA, SIS, etc.) but still very doable.

All of these SATA, RAID, Audio and Video drivers toegether is less than 1/2 gig on a DVD without being compressed. The Vista DVD I have is only about half full (2.52g), and includes every version of Vista 32 bit, so this is easily done. I have to keep all of these drivers in stock to support customers, so I don't think its too much to ask MS to do the same.

Had MS worked closely with audio manufacturers, there is no reason that these drivers couldn't have been perfected and shipped with the OS. Most drivers are. I don't think anyone can know for sure if MS or Realtek/SigmaTel/etc. are to blame without being directly involved in the process. However, I think its safe to assume that MS was the one who was in the driver seat (pun intended) for providing the necessary Vista info and getting the drivers in a timely manner.

Anyone who thinks that I'm anti-MS hasn't read my posts thoroughly, or has a reading comprehension problem. I make 90% of my income through MS OS systems. I like and respect MS, but its hard to argue that they don't work hard to lock everyone out of their software UNTIL they are paid a premium for access to it. Take the latest EU lawsuit for example. MS has no problem with releasing the info to make their Office software work well with other OSs. The sticking point is how much they'll be paid to release their "valuable" code. Then there's the EU WMP lawsuit. MS wants to include WMP to keep everything under their control in the media front. It doesn't matter which side you agree with, as the bottom line is that MS isn't going to give up control of media on their OS without a fight. They proved themselves to be wrong about WMP being integrated into the OS when they released the N versions without it. MS wants to charge very high prices for the info so that the 3rd party manufacturers have to raise their prices to customers, which makes MS products a better value in the long run. MS want's their hands in everything related to computers/computing, and its all related in one way or another. Its all about the almighty $.

And that's where MS misses the boat IMO. Too much greed and not enough common sense. By restricting access to the info for various 3rd party manufacturers to an OS, and their software info to work well with other OSs, they shoot themselves in the foot as people have to wait for the "bugs" to be worked out. People who buy early get frustrated when things don't work, and MS gets the brunt of the blame. People who wait for a SP to correct the problems lose patience. In both cases, it hurts MS's bottom line. I suspect that if MS didn't have to pay so much to lawyers to fight frivolous lawsuits and lose profits to customers who decide to wait for SP1 or get turned off by their OS altogether, they'd be much further ahead by releasing the necessary info for a competitive price. That's my only real criticism of MS, and its a big one. I still think they have the best OSs and software on the planet. But again, when you're the only game in town, you have to work hard to make sure everyone gets a chance to play as that's to your advantage, rather than trying to rewrite the rules to slant the game completely in your favor. MS would be so much further ahead if they'd lose the 'bully' image.

Just imagine if MS had released Vista with all these drivers installed, or at least easily accessible. Bad reviews would be limited to RAM usage (not a concern for new system buyers) and the problems with Open GL apps (which effects relatively few people). Vista would be jumping off the shelves. Instead, sales forecasts aren't being met. You can blame the 3rd manufacturers all you want. But the fact is that if MS had worked closely with these manufacturers all along, they could have presented Vista with virtually no driver issues in January '07. 3rd party manufacturers have a lot more to lose than MS if their products don't work with an OS. MS is in the position to make things happen or make things difficult for 3rd party manufactuers, not visa versa.

This is my last post on this issue, since I believe its all been said before.

Re: Re: Vista driver woes, update or upgrade?

Gerritt — 2007-03-25T01:08:39-05:00

Geeze Louise,

Dark,

I didn't say that you SHOULDN'T LOAD the original MB Drivers, I stated that I ran into the issue after UPDATING the driver. Sorry for the confusion.

Bobby,

As to the F6 functionality and MS. With all of the chip variations out there for SATA, SCSI, SSCI, Fiberchannel, as well as RAID solutions, et. all, you do have a point about MS not being reasonably expected to support all of the variations directly via the MS OS CD/DVD...HOWEVER, their historical REQUIREMENT that the only VALID source for these drivers be a FLOPPY was/is antiquated! Most every MB/System comes with the drivers on CD/DVD media. The basic CD/DVD drivers are present, else you couldn't boot to the setup on the Windows CD/DVD.
I contend that it is/has been high time for MS to permit usage of CD/DVD and other media, as well as the dinosaur that is the Floppy drive...

Crash,

The tinyurl stock question was a joke, sorry it went over so badly.
Any online redirector service that mask the actual end url can and have been utilized to redirect to malicious web sites that can cause security issues.

A quote from the TinyURL home page:

"Are you posting something that you don't want people to know what the URL is because it might give away that it's an affiliate link? Then you can enter a URL into TinyURL, and your affiliate link will be hidden from the visitor, only the tinyurl.com address and the ending address will be visible to your visitors."

I usually recommend to my clients that they not permit their users to access these sites; in fact most of the major Web filtering software filter these sites by default for the above reason, as well as providing a possible path around corporate usage policy, and being a possible vector for infection. So, it would be hypicritical of me to use these sites while advocating their rejection. My popups explanation was an attempt to keep it simple. My personal preference is that when someone gives a link that it be the original full link that I can verify goes to the end site, as well as page vs a possibly damaging 3rd party site, so thats what I did. From a NETiquite standard, I was unaware that full URLs were now considered to be uncooth. I've modified my original post to point to the base sites as opposed to the actual driver sources. I believe these to be less helpful, but by the standards in previous post more in line with the expectations of the users of this site.

All,
If there is anyone else's oatmeal that I've pi$$ed in in this thread that I've not explained or appologized to/for, please send me a private message (what I SHOULD have done when Crash asked me to shorten the URLs ).

Peace for now,

Gerritt

Re: Re: Vista driver woes, update or upgrade?

Bitmap — 2007-03-24T16:39:08-05:00

dark41 said:

Bobby,
If you'd read ALL the previous posts, you'd know that I was told that the AC'97 drivers would work with AC8888 on Vista if the MB drivers weren't installed first. That's why I tried it.

"While I highly doubt that broke your OS..."

So basically you called me a liar. No need for me to respond to anything you said after that. No worries, as the rest of your post shows that you don't know much about computers anyway.

What I meant by "While I highly doubt that broke your OS..." was that I wasn't saying installing the drivers in that order wasn't what caused your computer to fail. I.E. I wasn't blaming the computer failure on your decision of driver order. Something else caused that.

So, no, I wasn't calling you a liar, I was simply saying that I don't think those two incidents are connected. It doesn't make any sense to me how they would be.

And please, I know a fair amount about computers. I don't know everything, by any means, but I know enough to tell you that I'm slightly torqued about you saying that. However, this is not the place for that.

And if I'm wrong, please elaborate for me how the REST of my post shows that I don't know much about computers.

I've been messing with and working with computers since I was 5 years old thank you. 13 years.

Re: Re: Vista driver woes, update or upgrade?

dark41 — 2007-03-24T11:02:39-05:00

Re: Re: Vista driver woes, update or upgrade?

Bitmap — 2007-03-24T04:53:01-05:00

dark41 said:

Well the bad news is that the AC'97 drivers broke my OS. I tried installing them before doing any MB drivers.

While I highly doubt that broke your OS, it would make sense to install motherboard drivers first, then your AC'97 drivers, seeing how they are part of the motherboard.

In a logical sense, if you install onboard drivers without motherboard drivers, you have a missing link. OS -> motherboard -> sound.

dark41 said:

XP never required drivers via F6 for SATA that I know of. XP required drivers for large hard drives (137g and up) of both SATA and ATA/IDE until SP2 corrected that.

Wrong, sir. My dad has a 100 GB SATA drive that requires pressing F6 when installing Windows XP SP1. Secondly, XP doesn't need drivers for ATA/IDE hard drives, unless you have a separate PCI controller for it.

dark41 said:

Also, this was the first time I installed Vista to a RAID 0 array. Vista saw all partitions and all hard drives without loading any drivers from a floppy disk. Amazing what drivers MS can load into the OS if they want to.

Judging from your previous posts on this site, I'm going to go out on a limb and assume that you're taking the slightest of jabs at Microsoft, because you think "Hey, for once, they did something right!" with regard to pre-loaded drivers.

For starters, I'm going to state again that it is in no way Microsoft's job to include every driver for every device from every manufacturer on the planet. Microsoft chooses which drivers to preload into their OS from a large pool of devices they deem "common," i.e. older. Vista has all of my motherboard and chipset drivers, as well as some damned good drivers for my Radeon X850 Pro. And it's really no surprise they supported your RAID 0 array. RAID configurations are becoming much more common amongst home PC users.

Second, if they don't have certain drivers for a certain device, boo hoo. That's not Microsoft's fault, I have no idea where you get the logic that it is. Oh, sure they might have supported it in Windows XP, or the drivers from their website may have worked in Windows XP. Windows Vista has a completely different driver model, eliminating the HAL (hardware-abstraction-layer). It's much more efficient, but it isn't backward compatible. Why? Adding the HAL along with their new model would slow it back down. You'd have multiple devices running both modes, and as I'm sure you've heard the saying, a chain is only as strong as its weakest link. So it's up to the manufacturers of said devices to keep up with their drivers. A lot of manufacturers already have Vista drivers out. Granted there are a few which may not, but that still isn't Microsoft's job.

Third, if this was Microsoft's job, think of all of the companies out there which manufacture and distribute devices. Microsoft would have to get a hold of each and every single one of those devices and their latest drivers, reverse engineer those drivers, recode them to work with the new driver model and operating system, then extensively test each item, not to mention the extra burden of testing necessary software for a device, such as making sure iTunes can communicate with the iPod when the drivers are written completely different from Windows XP.

Re: Re: Vista driver woes, update or upgrade?

Bitmap — 2007-03-24T04:36:02-05:00

I hate it as well. I know you and I aren't the same person, but I probably would've said something to the effect of.

Gerrit said:

How is it that I've deviated from the accepable use policy?

You haven't, nor did I accuse you of such. I'm simply asking a favor.

You sound much more... moderator-y when you keep your cool.

Re: Re: Vista driver woes, update or upgrade?

CrAsHnBuRnXp — 2007-03-24T04:30:57-05:00

Bobby Phillipps said:

Gerrit,

All he was asking was to use a shortening service such as http://www.snipurl.com or http://tinyurl.com. In no way did he accuse you of acting against the FUP. And, just an FYI, SnipURL and TinyURL don't have advertisements. Others might, but whenever I'd used those two, never have I seen any ads. It's not a rule, it's just a little common courtesy, but you're not going to get banned or anything. If you did, trust me, s**t would happen.

Crash,

There are plenty of places on this site where there are obnoxiously long URLs in a post. Why you decided to single this one out is beyond me. *shrugs* Either way, that's no reason to freak out and rant your head off. It's a URL. They can get long.

Both of you,

Cool your damned jets.

*yay for playing peacekeeper*

I am aware that there are plenty of places on HWA that have huge URLs in the post. For everyone I find, I tell the poster of that link to shorten them up. If its a realitvely old thread and they are not around anymore, I do it myself. I just dont want to do it if I dont have to.

The reason I went on my rant is because I HATE it when people accuse me of things that I did not say/do. I get p**sed at family members when they accuse me of things I didnt do. If I did them, Ill admit to it. But Ill be damned if Im going to take heat for something I did not say/do. I realize that I may have went a bit overboard and I apologize for that. But my point remains valid.

Re: Re: Vista driver woes, update or upgrade?

Bitmap — 2007-03-24T04:12:09-05:00

Re: Re: Vista driver woes, update or upgrade?

CrAsHnBuRnXp — 2007-03-24T03:44:06-05:00

Gerritt said:

Mark,
I was giving the direct links.
How is it that I've deviated from the accepable use policy?
Do you own stock in tinyurl?
Some browsers will require that you highlight, copy and paste...but I figured most of the folks here could do that.
I don't use tinyurl, most often because of the pop-ups, but if I'm posting a legitimate link from a legitamate site, WHY?

Gerritt

I never said it wasnt legitamate. It messes up the entire page and makes it longer than it should. Common sense.

EDIT: The more i think about it, the more it p**ses me off because you are accusing me of saying that your links werent legitamate. If I thought they werent, I would have said so. Which in fact, I did not. All I did was tell you to shorten them up. And why the hell would you even ask this "Do you own stock in tinyurl?" And as far as pop-ups are concerned, I never get them at that site. Or ever. If you dont want pop-ups, use no script or a better ad blocker.