Despite the big fuss about the Atom/Diamondville CPU and the announcement that the 945GC is the chipset of choice for this new platform, Intel has secretly told its partners that it is about to discontinue the maintenance of the Vista graphic driver for the 945G and 945GM.

This comes as shocking news, as Intel has said that production version release 15.8 will be the last driver and the last release that will support the 945G series. The driver supports 945G, 945GC, 945GZ, 940GML, 943GML, 945GM and 945GMS chipsets, and in case there is any future driver issue with it, you can forget about a fix for it.

We know that Intel moved over to the 965G, G31, G33 and G35 chipset and that it's about to launch the G45 and G43 chipsets, but the 945GC is still going to be sold in huge volumes of ultra low-cost nettop PCs, such as the upcoming Eee desktop from Asus.

In the case of any major issues with the drivers, we are sure that Intel will reconsider this questionable decision, as this is expected to be a massively growing market this year. You might believe that this affects the Vista driver and that Intel will continue the maintenance of the XP driver, but again you would be wrong, as Intel has already stopped updating the XP drivers for the 945G series.