Being WHQL Certified has specific legal branding requirements. I don?t have the WHQL legal documents in front of me, but would guess you can?t say in your marketing material you are Win 8.1 WHQL Certified unless you actually pass the tests and get signed for Win 8.1. There are specific logos for each OS certification program, and you are essentially committing trademark infringment if you use the logo without meeting the requirements. You would also have to check the WHQL legal documents about distributing updates on Windows Update if you’re only downlevel certified.
From the ?does it work? viewpoint, drivers are often (mostly) upwardly comparable, although a downlevel driver may not take advantage of features in the newer OS version, so sometimes the answer of does it work is ?sort of?. For example, I believe client Win 8.1 NIC drivers require arp offload to be WHQL certified, Win 7 hardware and drivers with no arp offload will run, but will not work as well as a Win 8.1 NIC that had all the correct features.
Who your customers are will influence how deeply you need WHQL certification. If you sell a gadget to hobbyists to measure their indoor air quality, WHQL certification might make zero difference. If you sell in huge quality to a large system OEM like HP/Dell/Lenovo, in many cases you will not get the contract if you are not fully WHQL certificated and support all the correct features.
It used to to be the case (and maybe still is) that WHQL certification had a big impact on the support you received from Microsoft. As in, you are a big enterprise and call them up and say your critical database server is crashing, and their response will be ?Are you running any non-certified drivers? And if the customer response is yes we run an uncertified GPS driver to keep our time in sync. Their response may be, your support incident is free if you remove all non-WHQK certified devices and drivers, otherwise, we will charge $300/hour (or whatever) and try to fix your problem.? This is not actually much different that other OS vendors, like Red Hat. Part of WHQL certification was to try and eliminate the low hanging fruit of OS support as the bulk of OS crashes are caused by 3rd party driver bugs. Really WHQL certification is a lot like building codes, there are some minimum set of standards, but being WHQL certified does not mean your driver is high quality, it just means it?s less likely to be low quality.
Jan
On Sep 30, 2014, at 12:04 AM, aadhya sai > wrote:
Sorry…I am thinking of any Legal/License issues
On Mon, Sep 29, 2014 at 11:08 PM, Tim Roberts > wrote:
xxxxx@gmail.commailto:xxxxx wrote:
> I have a Win7 certified drivers for my GPS Device. I have tested same drivers on Win8/8.1 and they are working fine.
> So can I say to mu customers that you can use those drivers on Win8 also? or is it must that I have to run HCK tests again and certify them?
It’s an odd question. If you have tested them and they work fine, why
do you think your customers would have a different experience?
–
Tim Roberts, xxxxx@probo.commailto:xxxxx
Providenza & Boekelheide, Inc.</mailto:xxxxx></mailto:xxxxx>