DriverPacks.net Forum - News

Anybody lives here?

null@example.com (Debugger) — Thu, 13 Aug 2020 16:39:06 +0000

I am still alive

Getting married!

null@example.com (Wim Leers) — Thu, 28 Jul 2016 20:32:37 +0000

This Saturday, I'm getting married!

Back in 2004, when I was 16, I started working on DriverPacks while I was still in high school. I continued working on it and supporting it while in university (2006–2011), with the help of many contributors, although particularly with the help of OverFlow and mr_smartepants. At that point I'd already spent thousands of hours (that's months of my life) on DriverPacks, to save people around the world hundreds of thousands of hours of time.

Then after I started working (2012), I focused on keeping the site online and keeping it secure. It was mostly mr_smartepants and OverFlow that were working on new releases of DriverPacks. Since then, I've been sending the vast majority of donations and advertising income to the both of them — deservedly so!

Now, in 2016, 6 years after I met my girlfriend, I'm getting married!

If you've benefited from using DriverPacks over the past _twelve years_, Anneleen and I would greatly appreciate any gifts to get started in life — you can support us by using the DriverPacks.net donation buttons

*Thanks!*

Happy Birthday Wim Leers!

null@example.com (OverFlow) — Tue, 20 Jan 2015 08:30:47 +0000

It's that time of year again. Wim who was barely a teenager when he started this project is now a college graduate and a successful young man. Those of us who have who have had the privilege of being around from the beginning know what a wonderful, kind and intelligent person he has always been.

Happy birthday Wim, I hope you have 100 more !

Happy 10th Anniversary, DriverPacks!

null@example.com (TechDud) — Thu, 30 Jan 2014 05:59:27 +0000

Thank you, to all DriverPacks contributors from over the past 10 or so years...

Merry Christmas and Happy New Year

null@example.com (mr_smartepants) — Tue, 24 Dec 2013 13:03:59 +0000

A Merry Christmas, Happy (insert appropriate holiday here) and Prosperous New Year to all of our users.
Glædelig Jul og Godt Nytår
(Merry Christmas and Happy New Year...in Danish).

A major thanks to all the Admins, Mods and contributors for making our lives and jobs easier.
Enjoy your family, children and friends. Eat lots of yummy food.
If you must drive over the holidays please take care of yourselves and loved ones.
For all our users who have to work over the holiday season to keep us warm and our lights working, many, many thanks.

Stand Alone Driverpack (SAD) utility under heavy development

null@example.com (mr_smartepants) — Sun, 21 Apr 2013 13:12:57 +0000

Our Stand Alone Driverpack (SAD) utility is undergoing fast & heavy development at the moment and countless improvements have been made by new contributor "SteveDun"!
If you have any bug reports or suggestions/requests for new functionality then NOW is the time to let us know.
We are currently in a "code freeze" so I can finalize/optimize the code for a version 3.0 release candidate.
The forums are waiting! Get in there and give us feedback.
SAD Thread: http://forum.driverpacks.net/viewtopic.php?id=5336

Happy Birthday Wim Leers

null@example.com (OverFlow) — Sun, 20 Jan 2013 15:40:57 +0000

Our leaders Birthday today!

Thanks for everything Wim!

New OS discussion forums added

null@example.com (mr_smartepants) — Fri, 08 Jun 2012 10:28:01 +0000

We've added some new areas in our forums based on user feedback.
New section "OS discussions" and covers Windows 7, Windows Server 2008 (& R2) and the forthcoming Windows 8 & Windows Server 2012.
We didn't feel it necessary to include Windows 2000, XP or Vista as those operating systems are old and have rapidly waning support from both Microsoft and us.
Please feel free to stop by and voice your opinions.

New user registration requirements foil spammers!

null@example.com (mr_smartepants) — Mon, 12 Mar 2012 06:31:23 +0000

Our founder Wim Leers has implemented a new user registration process and as a result our spambot registration count has dropped dramatically.
In the past, we were manually deleting between 20-30 spambot accounts per day. Over the past weekend I've manually deleted 3.
Looks like we found a countermeasure that works.

66 blocked spammers since 2012-03-09 11:44:19
Last 24 hours: 10
Last 7 days: 66

So if you are a legitimate user with accessibility issues and are having problems with the new system, please send an email to the admin and we'll create an account manually for you.

Merry Christmas

null@example.com (BigBrit) — Sat, 24 Dec 2011 19:30:21 +0000

A Merry Christmas and Prosperous New Year to all of our users.

A major thanks to all the programmers and contributors
for making our lives and jobs easier with both XP and W7.

Enjoy your family, children and friends. Eat lots of yummy turkey and potatoes.

If you must drive over Christmas please take care of yourselves and loved ones.

For all our users who have to work over the holiday season to keep us warm and
our lights working, many, many thanks.

Enjoy and see you all next year.

Forums reopened to new users...for now.

null@example.com (mr_smartepants) — Mon, 21 Nov 2011 18:47:38 +0000

We've upgraded the forum software and migrated all the posts to the new site.
The change gives the forums a new look. Some will love it, some will hate it.
Either way, it was necessary in order to combat the scourge of the internet...the spambots.

So now the forums have been reopened to new users.
Come on in!

However, if the spambots are able to circumvent our countermeasures, then we'll be forced to relock the forums and use alternative measures for account creation.

There may be minor bugs that need fixing as a result of the migration. Please let us know of any problems you find.

Forums closed to new user registrations

null@example.com (mr_smartepants) — Sun, 13 Nov 2011 19:22:06 +0000

We have been forced to lock the forums to new registrations due to the violent increase in spambot registrations.
To protect the forums from these unwelcome intrusions, we have had to resort to temporarily locking out all new user registrations until the server can be insulated against these new vulnerabilities.
Please be patient while the server administrators work to fix the problem.

The forums will remain closed to new registrations until they are fixed.
No estimated time to completion is given. We may be forced to wait for days, weeks or months.

Current users are unaffected, and may post normally.
DriverPacks will continue to remain available for torrent download.
Lurkers may read & search normally.

Holiday season updates

null@example.com (mr_smartepants) — Sun, 06 Nov 2011 09:41:27 +0000

Many new DriverPacks were released recently.
Thank you to everyone who posted bug reports in our forums. You've helped make DriverPacks even better!
As usual, these DriverPacks have passed our testing-team's rigorous testing methods.

Many people continue to ask the question: "Why are the downloads only torrents now?" or "What happened to the direct downloads?"
Well, the answer is simple and has not changed:

"Greed killed the DriverPacks downloads."

Bit Torrent is now our sole means of distribution. Our donations dropped to a level that would no longer sustain the website AND download demands.
High-speed dedicated download servers are expensive and were the first to go. Then we lost our donated CDN bandwidth. Bit Torrent is now our only option left.

So, if you find DriverPacks useful AND you make money from their use (Enterprise/Commercial use), please strongly consider donating a fraction of your profits to DriverPacks to help sustain the efforts.
Donations have always been voluntary, but money is getting scarce.
As an alternative to donating money, many have volunteered to donate bandwidth by setting up a Bit Torrent Seed Server. More information is at the bottom of this page: http://driverpacks.net/donate

With the holidays and cold weather coming over the next few months, development of the DriverPacks will probably increase as the team spends less time outdoors and huddle up with our warm computers.

Spring Cleaning

null@example.com (mr_smartepants) — Sat, 30 Apr 2011 18:37:39 +0000

Many new DriverPacks were released in the past few weeks. The culmination of fixing numerous bugs reported in the forums and routine updates.
Thank you to everyone who posted bug reports in our forums. You've helped make DriverPacks even better!
As usual, these DriverPacks have passed our testing-team's rigorous testing methods.

Many people have asked the question: "Why are the downloads only torrents now?" or "What happened to the direct downloads?"
Well, the answer is simple:
Greed killed the DriverPacks downloads.

With the fair weather coming over the next few months, development of the DriverPacks will slow down as the team spends more time outdoors with our families and friends.

New data center, better server March 22, 2010

null@example.com (Wim Leers) — Mon, 21 Mar 2011 21:38:49 +0000

Over the last few months, there have been intermittent problems at the data center where our managed virtual private server is hosted. A couple of network issues occurred, but it's mostly that they didn't announce maintenance downtime in time (or at all).
Our hosting company (Exabyte) has therefore decided to relocate to another data center that should prove to be more reliable. At the same time, the hosting company is migrating all of its customers, thus including DriverPacks.net, to a far more powerful server (two quad-core CPU's with hyper-threading, 48 GB RAM, six 300GB SAS disks — shared with many other clients). This server will be able to accommodate future growth and should result in even faster page load times — pages are loading in less than two seconds everywhere around the world (most of the time even in less than 1.5 seconds, the exception being Asia)!

Hence, we should have even less downtime (it only caused a few hours of downtime over many months).

This should result in 10—15 minutes of downtime around 08:00 GMT+1 (07:00 GMT/UTC, 00:00 PDT, 03:00 EDT). Thank you for your understanding.

P.S.: you can see our uptime and performance at http://driverpacks.net/status.

UPDATE: we've had 2 minutes en 2 seconds of downtime — an impressive feat! Hooray for our server admin!