Poor sett of peripherals drivers in Win RT! How to solve?

Denis_63 said:

Having Asus Vivotab RT faced with the serious problem - Windows RT has no drivers for a big (even most part) of peripherals (scanners. printers, MFP, usb-cameras etc). Its very sad for so expencive device (+OS). Peripherals manufacturers, seems, are not interested in drivers development for Win RT Becose of that, I can't use most part of peripherals at home or office. This way was unrealizable. So, is there any other way to solve the problem with less of peripherals drivers for Win RT???

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Read microsofts various pages and blog posts.

Manufacturers are not allowed to make drivers for windows RT. The jailbreak tool we have doesnt allow drivers to be added either.

Scanners and usb cameras are not supported in windows RT at all. Printers are.


We cant fix this problem. New drivers can only be installed via windows update. Microsoft has to do them. Its also a very difficult task for them to write drivers for the huge amount of hardware on the market.

Oh, we *can* install drivers manually... it's getting them past the signature enforcement that's a trick.

I suspect that the same jailbreak hack we have now can be modified to bypass the kernel mode driver signature enforcement. Either directly put the OS into Testsigning mode, or spoof the results of the signature check, or something else of that nature.

Of course, then you're in the same place as the desktop software problem: you can only run ARM code, and almost nobody is writing ARM drivers for Windows NT. Unlike with desktop software, there's also very few open-source NT drivers. Non-zero, but very, very few.

Scanner

Denis_63 said:

Having Asus Vivotab RT faced with the serious problem - Windows RT has no drivers for a big (even most part) of peripherals (scanners. printers, MFP, usb-cameras etc). Its very sad for so expencive device (+OS). Peripherals manufacturers, seems, are not interested in drivers development for Win RT Becose of that, I can't use most part of peripherals at home or office. This way was unrealizable. So, is there any other way to solve the problem with less of peripherals drivers for Win RT???

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HP has an app for scanning, but only works for network capable scanners. I've tried it with my home scanner, which is actually an Epson, and to my surprise it actually worked. The name of the app is 'HP Scan and Capture'.

As far as printing goes, I've been able to connect to about a dozen or so. My Epson at home, and all of the HP LaserJets at work. A few I had to manually select a driver, on the older models, but they all printed. But that is HP, other brands are probably harder to work into it.

Other than reading storage, the cameras have no support. That is a bummer, especially since tethering a pro dslr would be awesome.

My Brother network printer worked perfectly but my Kodak didn't. I did have to select the driver manually in both cases

Denis_63 said:

So, may be there is possible way to resolve actual problem with poorest set of peripheral drivers (printers & scanners firstly) in win RT. The solution is to create some kind of the universal driver for all (most part of) printers with the simplest interface, containing minimal number of options. The main goal of those "unversal driver" is to make/force printer to print. The same way with scanners. If I'm not mistaken, such kind of work with peripheral is realized in some *unix-like OS.

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This is what windows RT does already. Tries to apply a set of unified drivers to multiple devices. doesnt really work as there is no set USB protocol for printers, nor a network one. Scanners are even worse.

If you go in device manager you will find most mice and keyboards appear as a USB HID device of some sort. This is because in this case a set standard was created for how mice and keyboards (and a few other devices too) should appear to an operating system. One USB HID Keyboard driver should work for all keyboards using the USB HID Keyboard protocol, basically, all of them Certain additional functions like variable dpi on mice and extra buttons might not work with that basic driver but the keyboard/mouse itself will still function as a basic keyboard/mouse, just none of the fancy features.

Printers dont do that. HP have a protocol they use. Epson have their own protocol. Lexmark have one. A lexmark driver wont work on an HP unit. Hell, the drivers for models with different features dont always work on another similar but not identical model from the same manufacturer. This means a driver is needed for each device. Windows RT makes a damn good attempt at covering many bases but there are too many printers out there for microsoft to make that many drivers, gets even worse when you consider microsoft are working on drivers for hardware not manufactured by them although I guess they get help from the OEM.

There are standard interfaces for keyboards, mice and removable media. There aren't any for printers, scanners, wifi adaptors or 3g modems etc.

SixSixSevenSeven said:

Printers dont do that. HP have a protocol they use. Epson have their own protocol. Lexmark have one. A lexmark driver wont work on an HP unit. Hell, the drivers for models with different features dont always work on another similar but not identical model from the same manufacturer. This means a driver is needed for each device. Windows RT makes a damn good attempt at covering many bases but there are too many printers out there for microsoft to make that many drivers, gets even worse when you consider microsoft are working on drivers for hardware not manufactured by them although I guess they get help from the OEM.

There are standard interfaces for keyboards, mice and removable media. There aren't any for printers, scanners, wifi adaptors or 3g modems etc.

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There actually ARE standards for printers, like PS and PCL6. The problem is that for many of the cheaper printers, the manufacturers don't bother implementing them.

Also, Microsoft has implemented new class drivers for cellular modems, but the problem is that the older devices don't really support those.

May well be that microsoft are just supporting those 2 protocols then and hoping that the users printer complies with it.

SixSixSevenSeven said:

May well be that microsoft are just supporting those 2 protocols then and hoping that the users printer complies with it.

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They didn't only use those, but they did rebuilt the print model. They then tried to cover a broad swath while at the same time knowing that they wouldn't cover all of them, at least partly because including a driver for every single printer ever would take a lot of work and a lot of storage space. They expected to cover 70-80% of the installed base of printers (whereas apparently Windows 7 only covered 60-65% out of the box), while cutting down storage by over half:

http://blogs.msdn.com/b/b8/archive/2012/07/25/simplifying-printing-in-windows-8.aspx

I know it's not really an answer for those with existing printers that don't work, but it is complicated to cover everything when manufacturers all have their own proprietary stuff (and often, multiple proprietary protocols, not just a single one for all their devices).