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After All, April Is National Windows Device-Driver Frustration Month

Microsoft released to manufacturing Windows Server 2008 and Windows Vista Service Pack 1 today. They’re heading off to the assembly line now and will arrive in manufacturers’ hands on March 1.

End users will have to wait just a little bit longer. Why? Give you one guess. “Driver problems.” From the Windows Vista Blog:

Our beta testing identified an issue with a small set of device drivers. These drivers do not follow our guidelines for driver installation and as a result, some beta participants who were using Windows Vista and updated to Service Pack 1 reported issues with these devices. Because the issue was with the way the drivers were installed and not the drivers themselves, the solution was simply to reinstall the drivers. While this worked fine for our more technical beta testers, we want to deliver a better experience for customers as we make the update broadly available.

“While we know that most customers who update from Windows Vista to SP1 will NOT be affected, our approach is to improve the experience for all our customers. To do this, we will begin making SP1 available through Windows Update in mid-March, giving us time to work with some of our hardware partners to make adjustments to the installation process for the affected drivers. As SP1 gets delivered through Windows Update, we will only offer it to PCs that we detect don’t have any of the affected device drivers installed. We’re taking the next month or so to continue our work of identifying as many of these devices as possible.”

Comments

  1. Solution: Switch to the far far far superior operating system. http://Ubuntu.com

    Posted by Bruce Wagner at February 4th, 2008 at 9:11 pm

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John Paczkowski has been poking fun at the tech industry and the personalities that drive it since 1997. From 1999 to 2007, he wrote the award-winning tech news Web log Good Morning Silicon Valley for the San Jose Mercury News, Silicon Valley's daily newspaper.

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