Can I distribute Win7 certified drivers for Win8/8.1 if they works fine?

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?

Thanks.

You can tell your customers anything you want. Who’ll stop you?

If the drivers work, then they work.

OTOH, they will not show-up as “certified” on newer OS versions than the one you run the HCK tests on. So you customers will still get the scary “this driver is not certified” pop-up. As you did, presumably, when you did your testing. Right?

Peter
OSR
@OSRDrivers

xxxxx@gmail.com 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.com
Providenza & Boekelheide, Inc.

Sorry…I am thinking of any Legal/License issues

On Mon, Sep 29, 2014 at 11:08 PM, Tim Roberts wrote:

> xxxxx@gmail.com 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.com
> Providenza & Boekelheide, Inc.
>
>
> —
> NTDEV is sponsored by OSR
>
> Visit the list at: http://www.osronline.com/showlists.cfm?list=ntdev
>
> OSR is HIRING!! See http://www.osr.com/careers
>
> For our schedule of WDF, WDM, debugging and other seminars visit:
> http://www.osr.com/seminars
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> To unsubscribe, visit the List Server section of OSR Online at
> http://www.osronline.com/page.cfm?name=ListServer
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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>

You’re going to need to tell us more, OP. Explain more fully what your question/issue is.

One sentence questions – especially one sentence questions that don’t have any information – do not give us the information necessary to allow us to help you.

Peter
OSR
@OSRDrivers

Sorry Peter,
I got a USB 1.1 OEM GPS device. It is already certified in Win7 and trying
to certify in Win8.
In Win8 all tests are passed except “HCK related” tests. Tests are failing
saying that “Device should be connected behind xHCI”.
The problem is I can’t see my device behind xHCI.
I have got a Dell Desktop with xHCI controller, but only USB3.0 devices are
listed under xHCI. But my device is always listed under “EHCI” controller.
Also I tried TI 3.0 HUB and other USB 3.0 Superspeed HUB which are detected
under xHCI. But again, if I connect my device to those USB3.0 HUBs, it
still gets listed under EHCI.
So I am really frustrated after chasing Dell to find a machine which gives
direct xHCI ports w/o any logical mapping.
So I couldn’t certify on Win8 yet.(But I have tested and running Win7
certified version of drivers w/o any issues)

Please help me here.

Thanks

On Tue, Sep 30, 2014 at 6:07 PM, wrote:

>


>
> You’re going to need to tell us more, OP. Explain more fully what your
> question/issue is.
>
> One sentence questions – especially one sentence questions that don’t
> have any information – do not give us the information necessary to allow
> us to help you.
>
> Peter
> OSR
> @OSRDrivers
>
>
> —
> NTDEV is sponsored by OSR
>
> Visit the list at: http://www.osronline.com/showlists.cfm?list=ntdev
>
> OSR is HIRING!! See http://www.osr.com/careers
>
> For our schedule of WDF, WDM, debugging and other seminars visit:
> http://www.osr.com/seminars
>
> To unsubscribe, visit the List Server section of OSR Online at
> http://www.osronline.com/page.cfm?name=ListServer
>