There's nothing more annoying than trying to find drivers for a device and having to dig around through the company's website ... Have I missed something? Does Microsoft have a central driver repository that you can point the driver installer to? If not, why? This would be such a nice addition to the OS.

Does Microsoft have a central driver repository that you can point the driver installer to?

If the drivers have passed WHQL and are properly signed, then they might be downloadable from http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/search.aspx?displaylang=en&categoryid=3

They'll also, under certain circumstances, appear in Windows Update (though I think you'll need to already have an earlier copy installed).

And if the original company doesn't make it easy to find drivers, then contact their support people and point out that you'll not be buying any more of their products again.

Just seems unfortunate that the user has to look for drivers at all ... There should be a repository where companies can sign and register their drivers so that they are automagically discovered and installed by Windows. I should be able to choose whether I care if they're MS Certified or not. Oh well -- if wishes were fishes ....

Business op?

Oh well -- if wishes were fishes ....

...We'd need a lot more baskets in here?

Not that it's any better in Linux, where even armed with a PCI vid and pid you still need to go looking round the kernel sources with grep in order to find an ethernet driver. Someone should make a website at pci.org where you can go to http://pci.org/11c1/5811 and it tells you that you've got a Lucent firewire card and where to get the drivers. And the same goes for usb.org (thought at least usb.org isn't owned by a cybersquatter).

Extra points if you can obtain the corresponding kernel module names by going

modprobe `lspci --urls | xargs wget`

Peter

In reply to:

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...We'd need a lot more baskets in here?

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we'd live in the sea

This is exactly what I'm thinking of ... This was not intended as a rant against Windows -- It really is equally lame on every platform.

When I'm done with this DirectShow Java wrapper + Soul Calibur stats database, I may just see what it would take to make a little webapp + client device enumerator to do this.

ms

I generally just plug the devices in, and let linux find / use them automatically!

For multiple ethernet cards, some of the GUIs can eth1/eth2/.. on their own just fine. I don't think I've ever had to look up the driver manually.

But that's just me and my 20 or so systems.

Cheers

This is just because Linux includes every module know to god and man in your install, though, right? But if you put in a new device that your kernel didn't already have installed you'd run into the same problem?

No, the distros generally load all of the drivers onto the HD, and they just seem to work. But if one inserts h/w for which there is no driver at all, then.. gotta wait a few months for a newer kernel.

-ml