Driver Woes!

[Lee H]

Why is it that most manufacturers only seem to release more and more "updated" drivers for XP and not the other varients of windows like XP64 and of course XP MCE2005.

For example, the latest drivers for MCE2005 for Nvidia graphics were released February 7, 2006 with the addition of a few updates and the inclusion of a few SLI profiles for games, yet their normal XP drivers seem to be updated every few weeks at the present time.

Now here's the fun part. More and More people are buying systems now with MCE2005 and Mesh, Evesham and a few other systembuilders are all offering SLI systems now with MCE pre-installed yet Nvidia seem to be just not bothered with this OS and have left the drivers to rot and as such newer games that are released do not have SLI profiles within the drivers which in turn is causing headaches with issues. I did install the standard XP drivers but all this resulted in was BSOD's until they were removed and the MCE drivers were reinstalled.

Looks like I've got to fork out even more money to get an OS now that has driver updates on a regular basis and of course updated SLI profiles

I've posted a nice polite post on the nvidia forums - but I've seen more life in Cliff Richard's Undercrackers than on that forum in all honesty and do not expect to get a reply for them soon.

[johnny02004976]

ive had to resort to dual booting XP64 with XP Pro becuase of the lack of driver support with XP64 - what i find even more irritating is the fact that microsoft branded products dont even have driver support for its own OS

[Lee H]

That's the point - you should not have to a dual-boot to get the best out of your system.

Why waste another 6-10+ Gb of space for an OS to play games and then reboot to watch and record TV (in my case)

[nichomach]

Agreed - and it's worse when you realise that XP Home is EOL'd this year - Pro'll go into extended support (and I reckon they'll do the same as they did with NT4 and 2K, i.e. cancel the scheduled service pack because of "lack of demand"...NT4 SP7 or 2K SP5 anyone?), but Home'll be dead. MCE will still be in its primary support cycle. It's shocking that manufacturers aren't paying attention to this and supporting MCE properly.

[young_one]

Windows XP64 was released about a year ago now and was in testing for a year before that. Still I can't find drivers for a few things, and these are pretty popular components, for the drivers I can find there are no related applications (my EMU soundcard has drivers but no app therefore is useless).

Why the hell did AMD and Intel make such a who-ha about 64 bit if they werent going to put pressure on both Microsoft and the component manufacturers to fully support it. It more and more looks like xp64 is dead in the water. I only pray that Vista helps.

[Lee H]

It's shocking that manufacturers aren't paying attention to this and supporting MCE properly.

After all the millions Microsoft spent on advertising this to the masses as the solution for their digital home it looks like instead of being an "easy and carefree" solution, it actually has caused me more hassles than it's worth.

Now, would MS let me swap my MCE for another XP as I am not willing to spend another 70 pounds on another OEM copy? No I thought as much. So now I'm stuck in a moral quandry in regards to "obtaining" XP to get the best out of my system.

It is a truely shocking situation indeed, and just to rub salt into the wound they have all the BETA drivers for every flavour of windows (EXPECT MCE2005) in the sun at the following page

http://www.nzone.com/object/nzone_do...etadriver.html

Now if that's not a mockery of Microsoft's vision of a digital home I don't know what is.

I hope for the sake of the end users that the media centre edition of Vista when it's released has better support than MCE2005.