Do you think DELL will give us Windows 10 drivers?

When it is released, do you think they will offer Windows 9 drivers for our Alienware 18 laptops?

Moderator Note: Since there will be no "Windows 9" the thread title has been updated.

 

As a current system I would be surprised if they did not.

 

Thanks mate, I value your opinion.

 

Most likely only for newer systems that ship with it.

Since windows 9 looks to be essentially windows 8.1 with a few changes(mainly start menu), I'm sure 8.1 drivers should work on 9.

 

Heck, I am still use some Windows 7 drivers for Windows 8.1. There is a good chance they will work, but (as ssj92 mentioned) it is not likely Dell will provide updated drivers for any product models that ordering new with Windows 9 was not a configuration option.

 

The Alienware 17x R4 and 18x R2 owners can forget this but for the newer systems they should provide windows 9 drivers...

 

It really doesn't matter in the grand scheme of things and I wouldn't recommend anyone burn any calories worrying about it at this point. Doing so is just wasted energy. Dell, HP, Sony, Acer, Lenovo, Toshiba, MSI, ASUS, Clevo and the other OEMs do not write their own drivers. They typically use what the hardware ODM provides. They might do a few things to tweak the drivers once in a great while if they did something weird on their proprietary product implementation that requires a special tweak, but for the most part all they do is test them to confirm they work OK before re-hosting them as an "official" or "recommended" driver.

Most, if not all, of the devices in Alienware laptops are more than adequately supported by reference drivers provided by the hardware ODMs... If Windows 7 and Windows 8.1 drivers do not work well enough, then Broadcom, Qualcom, Intel, AMD, NVIDIA, RealTek, Synaptics, etc. will most likely develop new Windows 9 drivers. If they do, then the new drivers will be available for download for those that need them. If the ODMs don't develop new Windows 9 drivers to support their products, then they won't be available for anyone, including Dell.

 

I would be surprised if the windows 8 drivers broke on 9 too.

 

With the leaked video and soon to be announced (???) release of Windows 9 I wonder if dell/alienware will release updated drivers for all their lines?

 

Doubt it. They will only provide Windows 9 drivers for computers that they officially ship Windows 9 with. I have yet to see ALienware add new windows support to a model that they never officially shipped the os with.

Windows 8.1 drivers should work fine on Windows 9 since the core os is very similar.

 

that's a shame. i am fine with windows 8.1 once classic shell is installed.

 

I'm still good with windows 7

Sent from my SGH-I897 using Tapatalk

 

Well, looks like MS is skipping win9 and going to win10:

Announcing Windows 10

 

I'll be installing the preview on my M18xR2 soon when it actually releases. The 8.1 drivers should work fine.

 

I wonder if DX12 will be ready in this preview.... Whichever, Windows 8 must be such a fail that Microsoft had to skip 9 and go straight to 10 to save face...

 

probably best to run this in a VM.

 

Windows 10 successfully working great on my m18xR2. Driver guide HERE

Enjoy.

 

i wonder if it's the same for the alienware 17.

 

Most drivers are likely to work either from the old OS or updated ones from the likes of intel etc.

 

The windows 8.1 drivers do indeed work for Windows 10, the exception which is the freefall sensor for the 17's which has to be installed manually but not a big deal there. Everything else installed beautifully.

 

are the technical preview versions time limited?

 

Yes I believe expires the end of April 2015

 

I'm just going to wait until it goes RTM and see if it's worth a darn. Rumor has it that the upgrade will be free for Windows 8.1 users and only $30 for Windows 7 owners. Hopefully, it won't be another botched-up mess like Windows 8. From what I can see, it looks like it might be better in some ways, but I am already not liking the wasted space having those stinking tiles on the Start Menu. Seems kind of retarded that they moved those stupid screen-wasting tiles from the obscurity of the Modern UI Start screen to an in-your-face bloated Windows 7-esque programs menu. At least Windows 8 lets you ignore the app-crap and pretend it's not there. The one redeeming quality to the Modern UI Start screen is "out of sight, out of mind" LOL.

With the Charms Bar emasculated and all the hot corners disabled it's not hard to forget which OS is loaded on a dual-boot setup, especially since I am using a Windows 8.1 desktop theme in Windows 7. I like the pointy-cornered windows and Windows flag start button.

 

the set up was so sluggish through virtualbox for me that i am not even going to bother installing it.

 

The windows server technical preview doesn't have the live tiles on the start screen. Also I haven't tried yet, but I'm pretty sure the tiles can be completely removed from the start menu. Although I still prefer the older style start menu(startisback2? lol).

In terms of speed, it's fast, just like 8.1.

I wouldn't VM it, you really can't appreciate the speed that way. The consumer preview should come early 2015 and should offer many more features.

As of right now, it's not very different from 8.1 in terms of features. You get the virtual desktops, start menu, enhanced search and the ability to run apps in a window. Other than that the build is very similar to 8.1. The consumer preview should offer many more features and the technical preview is supposed to get updated builds every now and then with new features/fixes.


Also I wouldn't count on this being free for 8.1 users and $30 for 7 users. Pricing will most likely be the same as it always has been for upgrade copies and full version copies. Windows 8.1 users may get a break for $30-$40 to upgrade, but I don't think Microsoft will hand out copies regardless of how people thought of 8.

 

This is where I read it. Windows 9 May Cost Windows 7 Users $30

I guess we will have to wait and see what they do. I bought my first three copies of Windows 8 Pro for $15 and got the Media Center add-ons for free when it first launched. Windows 8's unfamiliar and often bizarre attributes was quite damaging to their reputation, so it would not surprise me to see them being overly generous, at least in the beginning. They need to come to grips with the fact that most Windows users don't like it and go back to doing what has always worked well for them instead of trying to manipulate their customers into accepting things they do not like. Common sense should have been their guide. Some people do not like change, some are challenged and/or intimidated by it, and others that cope fine with change simply did not like what they encountered as a matter of personal preference. The fact that the radical "Modern UI" changes have never been fully embraced by the vast majority of their customers should be a wake-up call.

The UI looks a little better than W8. Not as cartoonish looking, but there still seems to be a whole bunch of wasted screen space being blown on fluffy eye candy. I will be most interested in how the final product performs, what features they have stripped out, how many pre-W8 features they end up putting back, what steps they will be taking to block us from modding it to be what we want in an OS, and very importantly, how much of a nightmare are they going to make the distribution.

They absolutely have to do better with distribution than what they did with W8... that was, and continues to be, a total joke. Just give me an ISO download, a USB flash drive or DVD and be done with it. No more smoke and mirrors using bogus product keys for downloading, and then changing to legit product keys to activate and all that kind of piracy-OCD nonsense, please. We shouldn't have to suffer through a bunch of rigmarole simply because unethical people exist, LOL.

 

If that turns out to be true, that's great news. I already have 8.1 Pro MCE on my desktop(hopefully I get 10 Pro MCE?) and my laptop has the tech preview, but I had 8.1 on it before so maybe it'll be free with my cd-key?

We'll have to wait and see. Hopefully you can go from the tech preview to rtm. Microsoft seems to be doing what apple did with yosemite. Provide newer builds through windows update. Apple will provide rtm to users of the public beta, I think microsoft may do the same for people with a 8.1 key. Maybe for people who want to do 10 preview to 10 rtm they would charge the regular price, making it easier to go to the new os for people using the preview.

 

Since there will be no "Windows 9" I updated the thread title accordingly.

 

I still find that choice a little odd :/ windows is usually pretty cheap if you get in there early.

 

I'm sure it was a cockamamie idea from someone in their marketing department that decided it would be a good tactical maneuver to try to enhance sales of the new OS by putting more distance from Windows 8 in the naming convention. That will probably work for the average user, but they often do not factor in the enthusiasts that largely ignore what gets said in the professional reviews, "test the mettle" and don't really care about what it is called.

 

It has something to do with the legacy code, Windows 9 would have messed that up somehow. There are reasons for it beyond everyone hated Windows 8.

Why Windows 10 isn't named 9: Windows 95 legacy code? | PCWorld

Why The New Version Of Windows Is Called Windows 10 - Business Insider

There are questions as to how legit this is, but Microsoft does not strike me like they care as much as everyone thinks. Just renaming something Windows 10 instead of Windows 9 isn't going to just erase 8 from history.

 

It could simply be the results of things like focus groups of course.

 

or could just be an executive being dumb
It makes no difference to us tech guys, just confusing to the masses

 

At least they didn't call it Windows X.

 

lol actually I would like that
they could also use an animal as the codename too!

whatever they call it is fine...the name "windows" doesn't sound very clever to me anyway

 

what's wrong with that? i'd call it windows X just to mess with the apple fannies!

 

Sure, for a little while. Being a person who watched Dell's official graphic driver support for my system vanish after about a year or so after purchase, I do not hold out any hope that Dell will backsupport older systems with newer drivers as the OS changes to 10. You're on your own, kids. Realistically, I shouldn't have to be out hunting for modded drivers 18 months after I purchase a cutting-edge piece of technology, even if Dell is breathing hard in their eagerness to let loose the R2 and R3's. That's poor support.

Oh, and did we already cover BIOS updates? Because that's in there, too.

 

I agree, the drivers for my Alienware 18 for Windows 7 are ancient, graphics card driver is almost a year old and this is a gaming laptop. They have bugs in their latest audio driver for Windows 7 where it doesn't install the Dolby Digital app if you don't copy a specific folder (PCEE4) from the older drivers, their ST Microelectronics Free Fall Sensor Driver 4.12.0040 has a bug where when you disable the protection, it will put it back on when you reboot, the OSD driver has a serious bug which i beyond the scope of this thread for me to post. I have reported all the problems to their regional manager last week. I hope they will fix them as I even gave them the solutions but I really doubt it.