TR Forums

I have a few questions for all the MS software pro's out there.

Could/will the Win8 usb 3.0 stack/drivers work on windows 7?

If so, how could one extract them from Win8?

And install them on Win7?

That's an interesting thought/idea. I'll let you know once M$ Windows 8 decides to finally freaking install from the disk on ANY of my spare or current systems without an error. - LAME!

I'd like to think that Win 7 will get USB 3.0 drivers in SP2 though....

Device manager can show you which .sys (usb<something>.sys generally) files are needed and a string search in Windows INF directory should be able to find the right INF.

As I recall though the driver model for Win8 has incremented up a notch to WDDM 1.2 (7 is 1.1 and Vista is 1.0). The OS's retain compatibility for older revisions (and 32bit editions of Vista and 7 even understand XP drivers), but I don't think stepping up is going to pan out too well.

I forsee the experiment ending in failure, but I'd like to be proven wrong. Break something and let us know!

Welch wrote:

I'd like to think that Win 7 will get USB 3.0 drivers in SP2 though....

I think Windows 7 will be lucky to get an SP2.

Its a shame considering its so new to the market in all honesty, and its adoption slower than expected. I mean don't get me wrong, it has taken over a lot of the desktop market, but most of my customers are running a Windows XP/7 mixing bowl on their network, for no other reason than to save money. I've attempted to get most/all of them to switch for security reasons alone, but they too have to answer to the gods of the wallet. I think Windows 7 came at a time where the economy got bad and people chose to push their junker/older XP machines until they died. The sad thing is people don't realize how much productivity its costing them to have slow machines and ones that aren't reliable. Windows 7 will be covered until 2015, so I'd imagine at least 1 more service pack will be released, especially considering another OS will be released in the mean time. The have to make the two place nice at some point. If they don't take care of the Windows 7 OS in hopes of pushing Windows 8 off onto people to make up for the long run of XP, then I'll consider never purchasing another Windows OS again... Take care of your customers people, or we will most certainly abandon you.

Welch wrote:

Its a shame considering its so new to the market in all honesty, and its adoption slower than expected. I mean don't get me wrong, it has taken over a lot of the desktop market, but most of my customers are running a Windows XP/7 mixing bowl on their network, for no other reason than to save money.

Yup, in fact the vast majority of people where I work are still on XP. A few of us are running Linux (Debian and Ubuntu), and there are also a few Windows 7 "early" (for us) adopters.

Welch wrote:

I've attempted to get most/all of them to switch for security reasons alone, but they too have to answer to the gods of the wallet. I think Windows 7 came at a time where the economy got bad and people chose to push their junker/older XP machines until they died. The sad thing is people don't realize how much productivity its costing them to have slow machines and ones that aren't reliable. Windows 7 will be covered until 2015, so I'd imagine at least 1 more service pack will be released, especially considering another OS will be released in the mean time.

FWIW XP still has about 2 years of extended support left, so I imagine a lot of people will hang on to it until late 2013 or early 2014. Extended support for 7 goes all the way out to 2020, so we can probably count on it hanging around on a lot of systems until then.

Welch wrote:

The have to make the two place nice at some point. If they don't take care of the Windows 7 OS in hopes of pushing Windows 8 off onto people to make up for the long run of XP, then I'll consider never purchasing another Windows OS again... Take care of your customers people, or we will most certainly abandon you.

I've already all but abandoned Windows for my own systems, both home and work. I still need to support it for other people, and keep a Windows VM hanging around for those occasional "Windows emergencies" though...

Indeed.

If there is no USB 3.0 support in the coming SP2 for win7 I won't be impressed. I think MS should also throw in an updated AHCI sata driver since there is faster ssd's and sata 6Gbps fairly mainstream now also, then when win7 was released.

When I have time, maybe 6 months down the road I will try to rip out the win8 usb 3.0 driver stack and dump it into win7, or something.