Not to beat a dead thread to within an inch of its sorry life, but ...
One of the things that has kept me from switching from Win98SE to Win2K
was the unavailability of drivers for consumer-grade peripherals. Even
drivers for business/professional peripheral devices can be hard to find
for Win2K.
The Linux/UNIX community has (until recently) generally written its own -
had to.
It seems that when a manufacturer needs to ship a device quickly (due to
its 6-month market viability) and has left driver specification to the
last possible nanosecond ("just-in-time" production), we end up with
peripheral and included driver which don't really work with Win98SE all
that well. After they ship the product, a "V2.0" driver finally gets
written. We go to the manufacturer's site and download the driver that
the device should have been shipped with. In the meantime, many of us
have loaded the crappy OEM driver which again, predictably, causes
Win98SE to crash - Norton can't save it usually; numerous files get
corrupted. Finally, here's my question:
Since the kernel for WinXP is essentially that of NT/2K, would drivers
written for WinXP work on Win2K O/S? I expect that every manufacturer
will have to write drivers for XP. I know there's a big issue with
retro-compatibility, but what do you guys think of it?
Jamie Costello
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