Windrivers.com Membership

I don't know if they will appeal to any significant numbers but thought it might be worth posting...the site is called Http://www.windrivers.com and they sent me a membership discount as outlined below:

1 - Year Membership ($29.95) $22.95 - Special Offer!
Unlimited Access for 12 months to WinDrivers.com. Includes a subscription to the WinDrivers.com Weekly E-mail Newsletter to help you stay on top of the latest driver additions and information.

1 - Day Membership ($4.95)
24-hour access to WinDrivers.com Only.

Offer below:
https://ssl.internet.com/windrivers/register.cgi?eventcode=NT_0307

I only post it here because I know how hard it "can" be to find drivers sometimes....maybe a group can contribute a few bucks each and use a "global" account...anyways, here is what's available on windrivers.com:

*A Searchable Database - Locate current and out-of- date Device Drivers, Anti-Virus Updates or Security Patches through our Beginner or Advanced Search options.

*Anti-Virus Center - WinDrivers.com reports on the ten leading anti-virus software vendors and links you directly to the latest data file downloads.

*Security Update Alerts - Receive automatic alerts when security updates occur.

*Latest Driver Updates - Every day, the WinDrivers.com staff adds the latest new drivers covering thousands of products across virtually every PC hardware category. You can browse by product type (covering everything from BIOS/motherboard to printer/plotter to USB and video) or by manufacturer (from Acer to Zoltrix), or by scanning through the monthly summaries.

*Hard Drive Center - Moving a hard drive to a new computer? The Hard Drive Center will help you identify the correct jumper settings and guide you through the treacherous process of partitioning and formatting.

*Price Watch - Before you buy a processor, check our CPU Price Watch for the latest market prices on AMD and Intel chips. All popular CPUs are tracked ranging from the latest AMD and Intel processors.

*Networking Center - Need to identify the pin-outs in a network cable? Need to identify an unlabeled network card? This is the place to go.

*DLL Search - No system problem is more vexing than a "DLL File Not Found" message. Tracking down the missing file can take hours of detective work. The WinDrivers DLL Search lists hundreds of DLL files, explains their purpose and links to the most recent updates.

*Service Packs - Direct links to more than a hundred Microsoft Service Packs for Windows, NT and Office, covering virtually every service pack Microsoft offers.

*Weekly E-mail Newsletter - A weekly newsletter delivered to your inbox with Weekly Tech News, MS Security & HotFix Updates, Virus Updates Latest Driver Updates, Latest Bios Updates and Weekly Hardware Reviews.

 

Wow... not only do you pay money for a sub-standard OS, you get to pay money just to make it keep working with your hardware. It's pretty much a rip-off. It may be useful for a small company IT guy who can't spend his time keeping on top of the latest threads and such, but most of the things they list are things that are very easily, freely available or things that you shouldn't need to worry about. Seriously, hard drive jumpers? Network pinouts? Pricewatch? Driver updates (probably useless for laptops anyway)? AV updates (if your AV software isn't updating itself, get new AV software)? The only use might be for old hardware, but it's iffy that they even have a working drive for most hardware. HP never even made a driver for XP for my scanner, so it's just not available. It's pretty much pointless.