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Buying Windows 7 - related question
KenW wrote:
On Sun, 08 Jul 2018 20:04:41 -0700, mike wrote: On 7/8/2018 7:29 PM, KenW wrote: If Dell does not have Windows 7 drivers for your hardware, you are stuck. KenW That's pessimistic. Hardware vendor drivers sometimes exist. Believe what you wish. Dell does their own thing with drivers (modifications) and many drivers from hardware manufactures will not work on Dell computers. Just went through that on my Dell. KenW The register level specification is only available to the hardware manufacturer. An OEM computer maker may re-arrange or re-package materials they received from the hardware manufacturer. For example, take a laptop video driver. The panel comes off a "digital bus" connection, perhaps LVDS. The panel has a certain size. The system needs VESA information so that the OS can find the screen. Some products have a low res and a high res variant, and the software materials have to match the setup. In such a situation, the OEM computer maker adds the necessary file to some software. And this is necessary, because the "panel" isn't actually PNP. The declarative software added to the package takes care of that. If the laptop panel had a hidden internal VGA connector, and the GPU had a VGA output, the two could be plugged together to make a PNP solution. Any driver would then be "bog standard". This is why desktop video cards with VGA and HDMI connectors work so well = they fully support PNP, without tricks. For something like Wifi, there might be firmware, and firmware versions. But some other driver types, would be bog standard, and no amount of splash graphic in the installer will change that. If my computer has an Asmedia two port SATA, that'll be a bog standard driver. ******* Microsoft has a great deal of leverage in this situation. If they want to strong-arm the hardware companies to not provide drivers for Windows 7, they seem to have some licensing terms (maybe for the "driver kit" that tells the hardware people how to make a driver), that give leverage. For example, no manufacturer is allowed to release their own USB2 or USB3 driver, for... Windows 10. When ever Microsoft finished the Class driver for a hardware standard, that's generally where the licensing cuts in and stops individual driver releases. Intel likes to "shave the edges" of this situation, by providing a USB driver. But, about ten lines into the file, you find #include usbport.inf which means basically "call the Microsoft driver and have Microsoft finish this please". The only thing the file actually does, is set a text string in Device Manager. It's my feeling, that Microsoft has used their licensing leverage, to stop driver support for Win7. Just as, in the case of the Microsoft attempt to do an x86 to ARM translator, Intel threatened to send the lawyer clown car. And so far this year, no Microsoft ARM based product has appeared with a 32 bit x86 run capability (I'm still waiting for a "battle royale" :-) ). So that's an example of the "vice versa", where Microsoft wanted something, and Intel told them to **** off. For some strange reason, you'll notice over the years, that Apple hasn't had too much trouble accommodating two instruction sets during transition periods. One presumes either the limited duration of the transition period, or some cash, quieted up such a situation. I think one of their solutions was done by Transitive. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transitive_Corporation "This technology was also licensed by Apple Computer in its transition from PowerPC to Intel (x86) CPUs, starting in 2006. Apple marketed this technology as "Rosetta". " I don't remember IBM or Motorola threatening Apple... Paul |
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