PCS-Electronics

I'm jumping the gun by quite a bit with this topic but I've been wondering about this ever since I heard about this announcement from microsoft. It seems that 64-bit versions of Windows Vista will not allow unsigned device drivers and, it seems to me, the drivers for our beloved PCI Max cards are unsigned drivers. I also understand that Microsoft charges a yearly price to companies in order to have their drivers 'signed'. Based on this, I have a few questions:

Will PCS Electronics pay the microsoft fee to have their PCI Max drivers certified and run in Vista?

Do any PCI Max users already use, or plan to upgrade to, a 64-bit CPU?

Are PCI Max users planning on upgrading to Vista when it comes out?

As for myself, I have been gradually switching over to linux for a variety of reasons but radio is one of the things that is keeping me using windows. Linux drivers are available for the PCI Max but they seem to be unsupported/unmaintained. It is also hard to find good automation and other audio programs for linux. I suppose I will continue to run Windows XP for a while but I do plan on upgrading to a 64 bit CPU as soon as I can (and when the software support for 64-bit computing has grown).

So I ask you forum members and PCI Max users, what do you think the future will bring for us?

Microsoft, how typical, is trying to come up with new ideas for extracting
yet more money from the users of its system.

We will do whatever needs to be done to keep the cards running. Right
now this is at least a year away and people will not just switch over in
one day, I expect there'll be a major problem with drivers for many components
that are out there today. When XP came out It took Creative almost one year
to come out with decent drivers for my live sound card.

I appreciate that PCS Electronics will continue to support the PCI Max cards even if it means paying the microsoft fees. From what I've been hearing about Vista, I will try not to upgrade to it until I absolutely have to and I suspect that others will do the same (although microsoft is already saying that some software will be 'vista only' like the next version of Halo).

From what I've been reading, it sounds like microsoft threatened to do the same thing with windows XP but then dropped it from the final release. Hopefully, that will happen with Vista too since they've already dropped so many other things from it. Linux is sounding better and better to me every day...

pcs wrote:Right now this is at least a year away and people will not just switch over in one day, I expect there'll be a major problem with drivers for many components that are out there today.

I think the new Vista will take a long time to catch on. At least XP was relatively close to win. 2000, but Vista doesn't seem to be close enough. Plus back in the day 98se was complete crap, so an upgrade was actually worth it, but it's going to be hard to convince people to switch IMO.

No doubt there will be hacks to get Vista to do things it wasn't "supposed" to do, likely along the lines of DRM removing and driver hacks.