Any ETA on Win2K drivers for RT2000

[LrngToFly]

Hello-

I have a relative who's interested in buying an RT2000. He also is using WinNT4 and will soon be going to Win2K.

Has Matrox given any sort of hint or are there any rumors on when they will release Win2K drivers for the RT2000.

Also, does Matrox have to wait until Adobe Premier is certified for Win2K? I hope not...

[DrMordrid]

They, like others, will likely wait for at least SP1 or SP2 before doing any serious developing for Win2000. At least they will if they are smart.

Check these articles about the 65,000 "potential issues" in Win2000, 28,000 of which are likely "real problems", and you'll see what I mean. All this from an internal Microsoft memo;

http://www.zdnet.com/anchordesk/story/story_4466.html


http://www.zdnet.com/zdnn/stories/ne...436920,00.html

It's always a problem programming for a new OS, but this kind of thing is what makes programmers go nuts. With so many errors to fix it makes the OS a moving target.

It's also what makes market research firms recommend not upgrading to Windows2000 until SP2, which many major ones are now doing.

Dr. Mordrid



[This message has been edited by DrMordrid (edited 19 February 2000).]

[coolfish]

argh. not this again. anyway, didn't MS say that Win2k would not HAVE any service packs? I recall them saying that sometime, i wish i had an URL.

as for the "65,000" bugs, what are you expecting? An OS with no bugs? You know that is not possible - with the billions of hardware combinations available, software out there, bad drivers (ahem), the millions of lines of code, bugs are, unfortunately, inherent. It's not like the machine won't boot or won't do anything you want it to do -- the odds of you actually experiencing one of these bugs (and noticing) is very small. They defined the term 'bug' in a very broad sense... stuff that could have been written better, optimized, made more eastheticaly pleasing, less confusing to the user, etc etc.. a large chunk of those so called bugs aren't even bugs in the everyday sense.

/end rant

coolfish

[gibverse]

I must agree with coolfish. I have been running Win2K for a while now, and it is much more stable then any other OS I know of. 63,000 bugs is not allot. Win9x must have orders of magnitude more bugs than that, and NT4 with all its service packs has issues of its own.

The fact remains that if Matrox hasn't put significant planning into Win2K drivers, then shame on them, totally irresponsible action on their part, and they rightly deserve to lose market share over it. However, Haig recently mentioned they were working on YUV2 into future a W2K PowerDesk, so I believe they do have something in the works. At this point, they probably have something in the ever-famous SQA.

John

[Elie]

I'm sorry I have to disagree!

You might say your running it and it's stable but let's say Matrox releases drivers
for both the RR and RT2000 and something goes wrong, guess who's to blame!

I personally wouldn't want to take the change and release anything yet until MICROSOFT FIXES THEIR BUGS FIRST would you??

Elie


[This message has been edited by Elie (edited 19 February 2000).]

[LrngToFly]

Ugh, sorry, but all OSes are *full* of minor little *possible* problems. I'm sure we'll all hit 2 or 3 of them, but that goes for every darn OS out there. Win98 SE is far less stable than Win2K.

Anyway, Matrox better be well into the development of Win2K drivers. The RT2000 product comes from their Professional Video division- the party (MS) line is that Win98 is for consumers and Win2K for businesses. If businesses hold Matrox to that, Matrox had better get the Win2K drivers out the door if they want to see this product do well in that arena.

(Yes, I know a lot of consumers and "prosumers" are interested in the RT2000- including my relative.)

[Elie]

Do you really call 65,000 bugs where 25,000 of them are critical... *minor*???

Cheers,
Elie

[gibverse]

First off, I can see not having the RainbowRunner/Marvel NT/Win2K driver development a high priority. These cards are primarily designed for the home user market, and NT/2K is not a common OS in this segment. However, as a Marvel G200-TV owner and 2000 user, I do appreciate the development of these drivers.

The RT2000 is another story. The card is designed for “Corporate, Event and Multimedia Artists.” These users will almost undoubtedly wish to run Win2K for their needs. NT4 is/was popular, but the OS has horrid multimedia capabilities, and Windows 2000 is a great improvement in this area.

John

[Dr Alien]

This 63,000 bug number is so irrelevant to driver developement, I'm amazed any of you would dare defend Matrox or any company for standing behind it as an excuse not to write drivers. Windows 2000 has had the most overwhelmingly positive feedback of any operating system microsoft has ever written (or purchased) and is arguably the best OS on the market period. Remember that this is not a from-the-ground-up rewrite. It's NT with directX, active directory, plug-n-play and ACPI power management. The system kernel and low-level services have been tweaked and tuned based on NT 4 and on improving NT 4. So this is the furthest thing from a version 1.0 (5.0 actually). Don't defend a company like a religion. They should deliver the drivers soon and if they don't, shame on them and too bad for us. I for one like having multimonitor and multi-processor capabilities in the same system.

-----------------------------------------
the doctor who is also an alien.

[Elie]

You abvoiusly bought a whole bunch of Microsoft stock eh Dr Alien

Regards,
Elie

[jpb]

Is anybody who takes this 63000 bug issue seriously actually a programmer? This is simply a number produced by code analyzer which indicates POSSIBLE errors which could under certain circumstances result in a problem. However, such analysis tools are notoriously ignorant- they are based upon the philosophy "better warned incorrectly than not notified at all".

Given the millions of lines of code, the
63000 "bugs" is statistically consistent with the results I get from running code analyzers on perfectly good, 100% bug-free code.

[salacious]

Microsoft didn't say that their wasn't going to be any service packs, what they said was that their service packs would only contain fixes and not add any additional features.

Salacious

[elister]

First of all, I work for MS (permatemp) in the Vidcap lab. All this talk of 65,000 bugs is funny as hell and VERY misleading because it lets people assume there are 65,000 bugs, glitches or otherwise problems with the OS itself. Thats just not true, if a OEM submits Win2k drivers and they blue screen on install, is that a defect of the OS? No, its a bug the drivers that MS didnt even make. A great deal of these bugs are like that (well at least for us in the lab).

Half of those 65,000 bugs are just comments that Developers use the track an issue. They could be typo's in the inf or dialog box or could be compatability issues that cant be fixed (like a Pinnacle DV500 craps out on a non-440bx based system *cough* COMPAQ *cough*).

I forget weather or not if its a list of 65,000 ACTIVE bugs or 65,000 TOTAL bugs.

[wkulecz]

Windows 9x is a toy OS.
Ergo products that only work with it are toys.

I'm no microsoft fan, but windows 2000 has so far exceeded my expectations. I've about completed the switchover on my main real-work machine (other than Unix/Linux) from NT4 to Windows 2000. Plug and Play is actually working for me not against me!

Because of the windows 2000 dual monitor support I'm able to move all my must work NT and photoshop stuff to windows 2000. The PIII-500 that was my Photoshop box will be available for playing with the Pyro under win2K and end up as my upgraded video workstation.

If there are no solid Matrox drivers for the RT2000 or G400-Marvel or whatever when I'm ready to upgrade from my G200-Marvel, then I'll dump Matrox and never look back.

Got a cheap TNT2 clone card to be my secondary monitor on Win2k, as nothing Matrox had would work (except for G200 card that nobody in town seems to carry. Matrox may soon be joining ATI on my s**T list.

If and When the video tools for Win2k and the G200 Marvel come out, I may move it from my current vidcap box (ASUS P5A, K6III-450) and try it as the primary display.

I'm not saying win2K is perfect, but the switch has been far easier for me than from wfw3.1 to win95 to NT4.

--wally.

[Elie]

Hey I don't know if we should take (permatemps) that work for Microsoft seriously eh guys

Cheers,
Elie