Microsoft's hardware compatibility list

[snopes]

Comment: I recently went back to school to get a degree in the IT field.
In one of my classes the subject of Microsoft's hardware compatibility list (
http://www.microsoft.com/whdc/hcl/default.mspx ) came up. In the course
of our discussion, the head of our IT department (who was sitting in on
class and has been in the IT field for 20 plus years) mentioned something
about hearing that Microsoft would pay a million dollars to anybody who
could find compatible hardware that didn't appear on their HCL. I cannot
imagine in this day and age Microsoft doing something like that. (The
rate in which different monitors alone are churned out would bankrupt MS,
I bet.) But, I could not find anything in my searches to confirm or deny
this rumor.

[BluesScale]

Gee, for $1m, I could build some compatible hardware. I guess that I am about to become rich. Ah, damn, turns out not to be true.

Actually, Microsoft charges for the tools required to get driver certification.

Blues.

[Troberg]

I've found several pieces of hardware that both the manufacturer and Microsoft swore wouldn't work which turned out to work just fine. Mostly, it has been some obscure data aquisition devices or controllers.

Even if the device doesn't work, what's stopping a third party to write a driver for it? For some types of devices, that's really easy, especially serial (traditional RS-232, not USB) devices.

A lot of hardware is also OS-independent. An ordinary mouse, monitor, modem, keyboard, speaker or hard disk care little about what OS it is connected to. The same goes for those stupid novelty devices such as USB cup warmers, USB fans, USB massage thingies and so on.

Best of all was when I called Promise about problems when I put three of their RAID controllers in the same machine. The discussion:

"It only works with a single controller. More than that will not work."
"That's strange, this machine has had two controllers for the last three years without problems."
"No, it hasn't. Two controllers will not work either."
"Yes, it does. It has worked perfectly for several years."
"No, it can't have worked."
"Well, it did work"
Repeat this for a while, before I managed to get connected to a technician.
"No, it doesn't work."
"Well, it works for me and have worked for a long time."
Repeat for a while. Eventually I gave up. The next day, an email arrived from the technician:
"I hooked up two controllers in one machine, and you were right, it worked perfectly. When I talked to the developer who made the driver, he said 'I thought you knew that!'. He said that it will not be possible to have three controllers due to adressing design, but two will work perfectly. We apologize for the inconvenience and thank you for your help."

I wish they could have listened to me the first time...

[Griffin2020]

You can download all of the WHQL testing tools for free from Microsoft's website. However, I think that you have to pay to actually submit and have them verify results.

The way MS does it is that the vendor actually does all of the testing,a nd submits their test results to MS, then MS "verifies" the results
(actually running their own tests to duplicate results in a very, very small percentage of cases).

The only reason that I know this is that one of the things that I did while working at Compaq (immediately before the merger) was WHQL testing, and I spoke with the WHQL lab in Redmond regularly.