Re: Drivers, Upgrades and SW design (was Re: Dedicated Z-wave sites?)

["Robert Green" <ROBERT_GREEN1963@xxxxxxxxx>]

"Marc_F_Hult" <MFHult@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote in message

<stuff snipped>

> >Easy, dude!  We *were* talking about PCs and the things that make them
> >stop working in *general* or at least one of us was!  (-:  I'm afraid
> >you're taking my comments as slams against CQ, and they're certainly NOT
> >meant to be.  Along those more general lines, we were discussing driver
> >problems and whether a typical end user had any way to tell whether an HA
> >item he had purchased came with reliable drivers or "junk" drivers.  I
> >made that point because some of the buggiest, crappiest drivers and
> >application software I have ever come across came from big name companies
> >like Nikon, Panasonic and Sony.
> >
> >As for gaming issues, didn't that signal we might *not* be talking about
> CQ
> >exclusively?
>
> Rest of 634 (!) lines deleted
>
> Bobby:
>
> Some restraint is required if one is to be successful.
>
> One can break any PC ever built and one of the most dependable ways to
> break a PC-based instrument controller like a HA PC is to also use it to
> run games. It has always been this way. Remember the USCD-Pascal-based
> Flight Simulator which took over the whole PC?

I don't know how a discussion of driver reliability morphed into a belief
that I want to run games on my HA PC, but that's not the case.  For review:

I noted an article on NOOKS, that talked about 85% of crashes in PC's being
the result of bad drivers.

I mentioned games as an application that caused video drivers, in
particular, to be very heavily stressed and that caused bugs to be found and
new drivers to be released, sometimes as often as every week when a video
board is new.  I had hoped that would have been a cue that this discussion
was about driver issues, and not about CQ.

The same problems facing video drivers happen to be true for motherboard
BIOS's when a new board is launched.  As the boards leave beta testing and
reach the real world, loads of problems begin to surface, many of which have
to be fixed by rewriting the BIOS code.

When a manufacturer changes drivers or firmware frequently they often break
something that was previously unbroken.  That means there's a possibility
that other programs depending on previous versions of that driver no longer
work as expected.  I used the example of video drivers used by gamers
because those drivers get worked so hard by so many people in such a short
time span that errors that might languish undetected for years in other
types of drivers are quickly exposed.