Listing of Vista Drivers

RadarSync writes to plug their page of links to Vista drivers. Listed are many drivers that Microsoft doesn't have and that aren't easily found on the manufacturer's sites. For Intel alone, 364 drivers are currently linked.

Comments

Can become outdated fast

[aliatgb]

The site is a good idea in theory but I would not recommend anyone to a site like this one for fear that they could be downloading outdated drivers since the manufactures site lists the current ones anyway. Its really not that hard to find drivers for your hardware from the manufactures site anyway and its not like this site lists anything out of the ordinary or hard to find.

Re:Can become outdated fast

[deft]

the problem is right now that these can't be found. And, they may be linking to pages that are updated themselves.

so, whent he problem that they cant be found is outdated, you wont have to go to this site anyways. i dont think this is intended to do anything but address the current problem.

Re:Can become outdated fast

[this great guy]

Its really not that hard to find drivers for your hardware from the manufactures site

Would grandma be able to do that ? Looks like not even that supposedly easy-to-use OS is really that easy after all...

Re:Can become outdated fast

[echo_kmem]

Its really not that hard to find drivers for your hardware from the manufactures site anyway I would see that to be the case when buying whole systems from HP, Dell, Etc. Just as much the same if you buy Brand name parts all the time. But when you work on machines for people who go cheaper and buy off-brand name equipment, then you start spending Hours looking for a driver for their sound card. Also, as another Comment said here, This list appears to serve to point out a problem with the OS than a way for Consumers to easily find Drivers.

Re:Can become outdated fast

[iamacat]

While I hate Windows, I actually wish this problem was not so easy for Microsoft to solve. Since they are signing all drivers, they could just determine device's PCI/USB/etc signature and fetch the driver from their website. The problem is that now all the hardware in the world can only be created with Microsoft's approval, which is way too much control for a single company.

Re:Can become outdated fast

[empaler]

I'm sorry to say that yesterday I had to resort to such a site to get my Lexmark x1130 drivers. I just couldn't get to them on Lexmark's site, and I didn't have time to horse around.
In Lexmark's defence, I'd just like to say that the site seemed slowed, possibly by DOS attacks. Either that or they suck.
At any rate, I ain't getting me another Lexmark any time soon - too bad for them, as I'm in the market for a fast document scanner... (Any good ideas? :-P )

Re:Can become outdated fast

[jackharrer]

I updated my friends desktop (HP Pavillion) with Vista. There were no drivers for AC'97! They got to be joking!
At least HP has shown they care and I was able to download them from their site. Plus ATI drivers that hardly worked, and some minor problems with WIFI (detected as something totally different, but worked!).
I had less problems with Mandriva on my new laptop. Everything worked out of the box. Including Compiz and Xgl.

Re:Can become outdated fast

[Anonymous Coward]

"The problem is that now all the hardware in the world can only be created with Microsoft's approval, which is way too much control for a single company."

... You mean like Mac OS X which will only install on specific hardware and only uses their own drivers (for the most part). Not sure why you're complaining. It's true that quite a bit of crashes (bsods) occur on windows due to crappy drivers. I don't see why Microsoft shouldn't regulate the quality of the drivers that are introduced into the operating system that they made. But whether their approval process is up to snuff is another question that should be considered. This isn't like open source drivers, where if a problem is found some kind soul will fix the problem within a week or so.

Re:Can become outdated fast

[griffjon]

Windows Vista: stealing the pretty GUI crap from Gnome, KDE, and OSX, but leaving out useful shit like apt and yum

Re:Can become outdated fast

[dlim]

Are people who buy cheap, off-brand equipment really investing the $100-$300 to upgrade their current computer to Windows Vista? It seems more likely that they'd upgrade in a couple of years, when the cheap, off-brand equipment is all running Vista. In that case, the appropriate drivers will be shipped with the machine.

Re:Can become outdated fast

[jaymz2k4]

i always wondered why they didnt do something like this in XP or earlier. aside from things like a portable harddrive I dont think i've ever had a success with the new hardware wizard actually finding something when it checked online. someone really should have said 'guys, this thing doesnt work' and removed it instead of taunting you with false hope...

Re:Can become outdated fast

[zero_offset]

"The problem is that now all the hardware in the world can only be created with Microsoft's approval, which is way too much control for a single company."

That's the same stupid nonsense people were saying when Microsoft introduced driver signing. It is only DRM-related drivers that absolutely require a free Microsoft-issued PIC (Publishers Identification Certificate), which in turn requires a class 3 Verisign certificate ($500/yr). All other drivers can be loaded unsigned.

I won't pretend that I think this is good -- like most people, I'm opposed to this DRM nonsense, for starters -- but the point is that your statement is absolutely incorrect.

Re:Can become outdated fast

[Joe The Dragon]

The M$ drivers are missing thinks like SLI, CROSS FIRE, NV CP, ATI CCC and so on.

Re:Can become outdated fast

[Mongoose]

I was talking about this the other day. How can you still be using installers over packages in 2007? Packages are primarily data where as installers are ( in this case ) win32 exec. A limited scripting support for mundane things is all you really need. A dependency system might be impossible for Windows to ever implement at this point, since they're locked into their DLL versioning shortcomings. However installing drivers like applications ( and poorly at that ) is a joke. Oh they have their little OEM text files and browse directory / cdrom dialogs, and this is pretty much unchanged for years. Linux kernel modules and deb packaging you can give you control over your drivers at a fine grain level. I also perfer how with Linux provides a large 'frist party' bundles of about anything you could need. I don't need a driver disk for anything I buy for Linux for this reason. Only certain things like Nvidia drivers and VMWare drivers require a seperate package with this model, which is how Ubuntu for example bundles them.

If Microsoft could fix their 'DLL hell' problem, revamp their driver model, and add a dependency/packaging system Windows might be almost as easy to use as Ubuntu. Users shouldn't have to hunt down drivers off websites like it's Windows 95.

Re:Can become outdated fast

[sponga]

AC'97 seems to work for me but when I try my SB Live 24bit card it does not let me use my mic to talk in games and communicate with my grunts at the office; plus I use my mic to work around in Vista to navigate around when my hands are busy. The default drivers that came with Vista seemed to work fine for other machines I built.

Running Vista on 5 of my home/media computers all with ATI cards of AIW9800 Pro, X800 GTO, Riva TNT2(yah it still runs Vista, crazy huh)and a 9700 Pro; ATI is doing very well on drivers since RC2 you are just lucky you don't have an Nvidia.

I have about a dozen friends who all recently seemed to get new laptops with Vista on it for the universities they go to and they all seem to be running fine; the only problem was with the WIFI which had to do with the WEP enabling and I see this problem with almost all of them; not like I expected them to understand WIFI anyways. I personally like fixing all the college girls internet connection around the complex here as it gets me free WIFI access to their connection and can get a couple extra goodies if the girls is good looking.

Re:Can become outdated fast

[RzUpAnmsCwrds]

That's not true. Not only are drivers built into Vista for Intel audio (AC97 and HD), but most third party codecs are supported too (Realtek, NVIDIA, VIA, etc.)

Certain AC97 codecs may not be supported, but it's misleading to say that Vista doesn't come with AC97 drivers - for the vast majority of users, it does.

Re:Can become outdated fast

[EvilRyry]

Sound did not work out of the box on the one machine that I tested Vista on. It was an intel 845 something or another with integrated sound. Video (also intel) and the SATA controller also did not have drivers out of the box.

Re:Can become outdated fast

[westlake]

It is only DRM-related drivers that absolutely require a free Microsoft-issued PIC (Publishers Identification Certificate), which in turn requires a class 3 Verisign certificate ($500/yr). All other drivers can be loaded unsigned.

I won't be buying hardware from a company that can't afford to sign a driver.

Re:Can become outdated fast

[zero_offset]

LOL... I was thinking the same thing when I wrote it. If you're producing anything that'll be electrically connected to my machine, you'd better be able to afford at least a $500 certificate.

Re:Can become outdated fast

[JesusKebab]

I installed Vista on my HP zd8000. The volume icon told me i didn't have a sound card installed. I went to the device manager, right clicked on the "unknown sound driver", clicked "update", and bam! my sound worked. we're not talking rocket science here. in fact, with Vista, using the OS to find drivers has been the easiest out of all the windows OS's i've used to date. I can easily count how many times "find the best driver online" has worked with XP and 2000. But then, it's not difficult to count to ZERO. Shame on Microsoft for expecting the manufacturers to write drivers. Bad Microsoft! Shame on Microsoft for making it easy to install those drivers.

Re:Can become outdated fast

[andy314159pi]

you know, i've been using linux for years and I still don't know what apt is.

Re:Can become outdated fast

[Anonymous Coward]

There is a rudimentary form of package 'management' in Windows: MSI. It just doesn't manage anything: it allows basically to strip the win32 stuff from the installer and just leave the installation data in xml-form with cabinets where data can be extracted from. Much could and should be improved indeed.

Re:Can become outdated fast

[iamacat]

With all major OSes - Windows, MacOSX and Linux - you are mostly using drivers that come from the vendor. Only MacOSX lets you download and install a binary driver from an unrelated 3rd party and not worry about updating it after every kernel security patch.

Re:Can become outdated fast

[iamacat]

• Open source drivers for older hardware, or with extra functionality
  
• Software-only drivers for stuff like capturing your sound/video to disk or forwarding over the network.
  
• Companies that Microsoft refuse to sign drivers for, because they are direct and dangerous competitors
  

Re:Can become outdated fast

[Kalriath]

There is a rudimentary form of package 'management' in Windows: MSI. It just doesn't manage anything: it allows basically to strip the win32 stuff from the installer and just leave the installation data in xml-form with cabinets where data can be extracted from. Much could and should be improved indeed. You could not be more wrong. Windows Installer completely manages MSI-installed applications to ensure they are not damaged (repairs applications if they appear to be broken), provides a single installation/uninstallation method with predictable management for the user (any MSI installed apps appear in Add/Remove Programs without exception).

Also, MSI packages (as that's what they are) can make modifications to configuration of IIS, modify files (like, say, httpd.ini for apache users), change registry entries, create users, edit ACLs, and all sorts of other weird and useful stuff. Best of all, the installer service tracks these changes and rolls them back if the app is uninstalled or install fails.

Re:Can become outdated fast

[orasio]

I just dislike Microsoft, and don't want or need to have anything to do with them. It might not be a sound bussiness decision, but I am entitled to that.
In the unlikely case that I produced some custom hardware, and its drivers, I might be able to afford, but not willing to agree with MS certification. That doesn't say anything about the quality of my eventual hardware, I think.

Re:Can become outdated fast

[zero_offset]

In that case you are also disassociating yourself from Microsoft's user-base, and that very clearly is not a sound business decision.

Re:Can become outdated fast

[griffjon]

Ah, you gotta love the /. moderation system, where my little piece of flamebait gets up to 5, whereas your actual thought-out exploration of the problem stops at 2.

MS needs to do what Apple did when they jumped from 9 to 10; which is (a) change everything and (b) make a virtual machine to keep legacy apps that didn't convert over working.

As you touched on and the other responder mentioned, Windows has a nascent and under-used "package" system with cab/infs and MSI, it's just not centralized or tied in with the DLL-hell problems.

DLLs I think are both less and more of a problem than people talk about - it shouldn't be that hard to create a local listing of all DLLs and their versions, and then have programs check to see if they need to add their own or not. I avoid dealing with this area, anyhow, so maybe that's too elementary.

Re:Can become outdated fast

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes, that's all good - that is, if MSI is what is being used as the installer. I only know of one 3rd party non-commercial app that uses msi - python. All other apps I ever used had either exe installers or NSIS (or their own install system).

What would be interesting is if msi were mandatory - I assume that would be an improvement. Is that the case for drivers? A quick google search didn't show anything, and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Features_new_to_Windo ws_Vista only had this:

Windows Installer 4.0 (MSI 4.0) with support for features such as User Account Control, Restart Manager, and Multilingual User Interface

Good news for competition

[JPMaximilian]

This is good news for Linux and OS X. Installing Drivers is so 1998.

Re:Good news for competition

[phantomfive]

This is good news for Linux and OS X. Installing Drivers is so 1998.

Yes, because no one ever has trouble getting a wifi card to work under Linux. Or printer drivers working under OSX. In fact, surprising though it may be to you, getting drivers to work is often one of the biggest difficulties of installing Linux. And sure, OSX comes with drivers for all the Apple hardware, but if you have some weird piece of proprietary hardware, there is a good possibility you won't ever find a driver for it.

As for Windows Vista, I hope it falls on it's face or at least loses 30% market share, leaving the rest for OSX, linux, openbsd, solaris, and a beautiful world of open standards and interoperability. Or at least giving people more freedom to leave windows if they need to.

Re:Good news for competition

[JPMaximilian]

This is good news for Linux and OS X. Installing Drivers is so 1998.

Yes, because no one ever has trouble getting a wifi card to work under Linux. Or printer drivers working under OSX. In fact, surprising though it may be to you, getting drivers to work is often one of the biggest difficulties of installing Linux.
Your dripping sarcasm is tiresome, however you make a point. I do know how difficult it can be to get a wireless card to work. However, the point is, many distros, such as Ubuntu, require 0 drivers to install (depending on your hardware). On my desktop the only drivers I would have had to install were video drivers if I wanted 3d acceleration. My point is, if Vista is more difficult to setup than Linux (certainly it's more difficult than OS X), there is a greater chance of end users trying out the alternatives.

Re:Good news for competition

[nmb3000]

However, the point is, many distros, such as Ubuntu, require 0 drivers to install (depending on your hardware).

Do you have any idea how ironic this sentence is? OF COURSE it depends on your hardware! I bet you could find a hardware configuration that will work completely off Vista's native driver cache as well, especially if you're happy with vanilla video and sound support.

On my desktop the only drivers I would have had to install were video drivers if I wanted 3d acceleration.

Anymore 3D acceleration is pretty much a must-have. Especially with newfangled things like Aero and XGL becoming the norm. Even basic tasks like moving windows around perform much, much better with acceleration.

(certainly it's more difficult than OS X)

I bet if Microsoft made all their own hardware and then locked people into only using Vista on said hardware, it would be easy as pie to get Vista configured for the hardware. What an idea! Except, of course, that the whole idea behind the PC is open hardware standards, vendor competition, and consumer choice.

Honestly, the way Windows (and Linux to a large extent, though it's vendor base is significantly smaller than Windows) manages to interoperate with hundreds of thousands of different vendor's drivers is pretty impressive. It's one thing to claim stability when 95% consumer configurations are identical to your test bench, it's another to have no idea what kind of cheap crazy crap consumers will install and still have comparable stability.

Re:Good news for competition

[Hucko]

The Xbox did work reasonably well. I haven't downloaded an update for it though. I was going to 'correct' this

I bet if Microsoft made all their own hardware and then locked people into only using Vista on said hardware, it would be easy as pie to get Vista configured for the hardware. What an idea! Except, of course, that the whole idea behind the PC is open hardware standards, vendor competition, and consumer choice. however I realised MS does compile reasonably good hardware.

Honestly, the way Windows (and Linux to a large extent, though it's vendor base is significantly smaller than Windows) manages to interoperate with hundreds of thousands of different vendor's drivers is pretty impressive. It's one thing to claim stability when 95% consumer configurations are identical to your test bench, it's another to have no idea what kind of cheap crazy crap consumers will install and still have comparable stability.

Huh? Windows only installs on x86 machines. I'm having trouble remembering anything of significance linux won't run on, at least to some degree. I'm sure someone will remind me. While there may be more installs of Windows out there, linux works on more configurations. Most of the installs would work reasonably well with linux. Installing new hardware sometimes does bring the horror you describe.

Except, of course, that the whole idea behind the PC is open hardware standards, vendor competition, and consumer choice.

If there were truth to this, linux would have less trouble working with the devices previously named. It works well enough in spite of little to no co-operation by the "open standards" of the PC. If linux had half the co-operation Microsoft has, the driver situation would be less prevalent. Vendor competition and consumer choice has helped, I'll give you that. Generosity of developers has too.

Re:Good news for competition

[wfWebber]

No no, you got that mixed up. Most the drivers you see in Linux are from 1998. But no worries mate, they'll catch up soon enough!

Re:Good news for competition

[skoaldipper]

> As for Windows Vista, I hope it falls on it's face or at least loses 30% market share, leaving the rest for OSX, linux, openbsd, solaris, and a beautiful world of open standards and interoperability.

It would be nice, but I think that 30 percent drop would just translate to 30 percent fewer people migrating away from XP. Old habits are hard to break, especially consumer loyalty tied to one product in the big bad boogeyman world of technology. I think our one saving grace here is the push by many governments and corporations to gradually phase in desktop alternatives. That's the cheapest and most influential form of advertising out there. And, you know, if media codecs just weren't so dog gone closely tied to Microsoft on the internet, I bet a lot of us freaky deekies could care less if anyone else switched to linux or not; it's like finding your own gold mine in the New Mexico desert while all the prospectors are still out in California. But I sure do get tired of digging around cactus and rattlesnakes at times when everyone else already has a mine. You know, I'm even starting to confuse myself with this analogy so I better stop right here, but hopefully, I did make some sense along the way.

Re:Good news for competition

[flimflammer]

I don't know about you, but every machine I have ever installed XP has had USB, some decent amount of sound (it really varies on your sound card, but it's been my experience that it'll usually work), and networking out of the box. "Bad video" as it may, is not necessarily less present in Linux. I've installed a few distros only to have pretty crappy desktop performance out of the box.

Re:Good news for competition

[iamacat]

Especially with newfangled things like Aero and XGL becoming the norm. Even basic tasks like moving windows around perform much, much better with acceleration.

Sounds like bad coding to me. Despite fancy appearance, windows are still 2D and the notion that a Core Duo can not blend a megapixel of data with its background seems preposterous.

Re:Good news for competition

[cheater512]

My old Pentium 3 has a standard Intel motherboard which was made ages before XP.
None of the above worked.

All of it is pretty standard stuff and all of it was made a long time before XP.
AC97 audio, Intel usb controller, Broadcom networking, TNT2, etc...

It got rather interesting with reinstalls since back then it had USB wireless for networking.
You have no idea how useful usb flash disks are until you cant use them.
Any reinstall required a very long search for the original cd.

Funnily enough ALL the mentioned hardware works out of the box with minimal tinkering on Linux.
Yes even the USB wifi.

Re:Good news for competition

[evilviper]

getting drivers to work is often one of the biggest difficulties of installing Linux.

Well then it's a good thing I use FreeBSD. *ducks*

Re:Good news for competition

[empaler]

I bet if Microsoft made all their own hardware and then locked people into only using Vista on said hardware, it would be easy as pie to get Vista configured for the hardware. What an idea! Except, of course, that the whole idea behind the PC is open hardware standards, vendor competition, and consumer choice.

Honestly, the way Windows (and Linux to a large extent, though it's vendor base is significantly smaller than Windows) manages to interoperate with hundreds of thousands of different vendor's drivers is pretty impressive. It's one thing to claim stability when 95% consumer configurations are identical to your test bench, it's another to have no idea what kind of cheap crazy crap consumers will install and still have comparable stability. This just makes it so much more fun that I had trouble getting my wireless Microsoft Keyboard/Mouse set to work in Vista... I had to force drivers on it that weren't released for Vista (but works fine). By force, I mean simple edits in install INFs, but still not market-ready.

Re:Good news for competition

[xtracto]

I have been gladly surprised a few days ago by a Ubuntu installation I have in a P3-450Mhz where I installed it (found in the trash of a neighbour =o)). When I installed it *almost* everything went smoothly. However I had problems with the ethernet LAN card (no, not he wifi) because the interface seemed to go up for some seconds and then died. It turned to be that there were 2 drivers loaded in the kernel *for the same hardware*. That was stupid, but at the end it was just a matter of unloading the driver.

But that was not my pleasant surprise, the good thing happened after I bought a Canon Lide 20 scanner (a pretty nice piece of hardware for the £20) and, after connecting it to the USB port of the Ubuntu machine and starting thinking "ok, I will go to the forums and search for any information about the drivers to see where shall I download them..." I had a very pleasant surprise to see that the scanner *just worked* it was recognized and I could use it with Ubuntu's scanning program (sorry, I dont know the name, and that, i think is something better.... and no it was not the Gimp). This meant that the Operating system did not blocked my way in any way.

On the other side, when I plugged the scanner to my Windows XP (SP2 top notch bla blah) notebook, windows detected the "piece of plastic" plugged trough the USB, and then the "hardware installation wizard" appeared and asked me if I wanted to look on the internet for the drivers, after answering yes, Windows told me that it didn't have drivers and it could not do anything else with my piece of plastic. Crap... I needed the installation disk, but the problem is that the installation disk installs too much crap. And how can it be that, in the sucker-without-drivers-Linux OS I did not have any trouble and the top-notch-uber-cool-grandma-eXperIence-Windows could not recognize a simple scanner that has been out more than two years?

So yeah pretty much it depends on the hardware but if you see, a default Windows installation does not *provide* all the hardware drivers, just look at the list of available drivers when you try to install one (manually install device/select from a list/list all devices) and you will see whereas Linux supports a *huge* number of them *out of the box* (any standard Desktop aimed distro).

Honestly, the way Windows (and Linux to a large extent, though it's vendor base is significantly smaller than Windows) manages to interoperate with hundreds of thousands of different vendor's drivers is pretty impressive.
It is impressive that Windows even *works* with the way drivers are done. Of course the Windows driver for my scanner is completely crap [stability wise] whereas the Linux driver is very stable... unfortunately with some other hardware there are lots of features that the linux drivers just do not have (like my Logitech webcam for notebooks deluxe ).

Re:Good news for competition

[Mattsson]

I don't understand.
He was saying that Apple work better than MS or Linux because they only support their own hardware and that if MS only needed to support MS-made hardware (like apple) they'd too be more stable.
He also said that it is amazing how MS and Linux can be so stable with all the millions of different hardware-combinations they run...
What has that to do with how Linux compares to MS?
And even though Linux do run on lots of architectures, the sheer amount of x86-hardware out there and the incredible "Nr of installed MS-OS vs Nr of installed Linux"-ration might actually make the number of unique combinations of hardware with an MS-OS installed larger than the unique combinations that has Linux installed.

And I'd say that the standard x86-architecture is pretty open. No weird "Microsoft-bus" anywhere that only lets you install Microsoft-hardware or graphics-cards that only will work with a certain motherboard-vendor, etc.
That certain hardware-designers choose not to release specifications on their chips doesn't make the entire architecture proprietary, like Apple, Sun, Silicon-Graphics, Atari, Amiga, etc, etc...
The only really proprietary, non-open piece in a standard x86 PC is the processor-socket. You can either go Intel or AMD and have to decide this when you buy your mainboard.

Re:Good news for competition

[PopeRatzo]

Honestly, the way Windows ... manages to interoperate with hundreds of thousands of different vendor's drivers is pretty impressive.

Honestly, I'm not so impressed. It is their business after all, and they're one of the biggest companies (monopolies) in the world, so why should I be impressed that their flagship product mostly works with other products that were designed for it?

Re:Good news for competition

[GundamFan]

This surprises me a little bit. Are you saying that the keyboard and mouse did not work at all or simply that the extra functions (like side scrolling and media buttons) didn't work?

Re:Good news for competition

[darth_linux]

I bet if Microsoft made all their own hardware and then locked people into only using Vista on said hardware, it would be easy as pie to get Vista configured for the hardware. What an idea! Except, of course, that the whole idea behind the PC is open hardware standards, vendor competition, and consumer choice.

you better remind M$ of that. they think the PC is theirs because their OS (all you do is lease permission to use it) is installed.

Re:Good news for competition

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes, because no one ever has trouble getting a wifi card to work under Windows.

It's not Linux's fault, it's not Windows' fault, it's the wifi card manufacturers who refuse to follow standards, or make things simple/compatible.

Re:Good news for competition

[JPMaximilian]

However, the point is, many distros, such as Ubuntu, require 0 drivers to install (depending on your hardware).

Do you have any idea how ironic this sentence is? No.

OF COURSE it depends on your hardware! The number of drivers that are available for Vista at this point are small. Which comes back to my origional point that if Microsoft makes the transistion to Vista painful, Linux and OS X might gain market share.

I bet you could find a hardware configuration that will work completely off Vista's native driver cache as well, especially if you're happy with vanilla video and sound support.
Agreed.

Anymore 3D acceleration is pretty much a must-have. Especially with newfangled things like Aero and XGL becoming the norm. Even basic tasks like moving windows around perform much, much better with acceleration. A 3D accelerated desktop is still a matter of preference, if it isn't please let me know what Linux distros come with XGL/Compiz/Beryl as the default. And to say Aero is the norm is silly. The install base is still quite low (it just came out for goodness sake), even if a large number of people tried to upgrade it's likely that their hardware is too old, and even if they have the right hardware they might not have Vista drivers for it. Which brings up my original point, that if Vista is hard to transition to, Competitors such as Linux and OS X can gain market share.

I bet if Microsoft made all their own hardware and then locked people into only using Vista on said hardware, it would be easy as pie to get Vista configured for the hardware. What an idea! The fact of the matter is they don't do this and Apple does, its a business model decision and if you take the path Microsoft did, you ought to make efforts to help hardware companies have drivers ready.

Except, of course, that the whole idea behind the PC is open hardware standards, vendor competition, and consumer choice.
I don't know who (if anyone) defined what the idea is behind the PC. But I do prefer open hardware standards, vendor competition, and consumer choice, as well as open software, which is why I hope this helps out Linux.

Re:Good news for competition

[Anonymous Coward]

>> Sounds like bad coding to me.

Sounds like you never tried to code a blender. Todays processors are still too lame to, say, blend two generic 2048x1536 surfaces in less than 1ms.

I've spent like a week on it and reached (IIRC) about 15ms for 1920x1080 using SSE2. Let us know your results, oh so mighty programmer.

Re:Good news for competition

[ElleyKitten]

Yes, because no one ever has trouble getting a wifi card to work under Linux. Or printer drivers working under OSX. In fact, surprising though it may be to you, getting drivers to work is often one of the biggest difficulties of installing Linux.

Linux doesn't have drivers for everything, but it's on the right track. I've had over the years an IBM laptop, Compaq laptop, and two Dell desktops (not counting ones I've built myself), all came with Windows of course, and all of their default hardware works 100% with Linux, even the wireless cards that came with the laptops. I had to install 3d drivers for the video cards on the desktops, but that was as simple as running EasyUbuntu and checking if I had nvidia or ati. Fresh installs of Linux on all my machines are completely usable instantly, despite being made for Windows, while fresh Windows installs don't even recognize the ethernet ports, let alone a display above 800x600, wireless, sound, printers, AAAHHHH!

Not that all is happy in the Linux world. Finding a wireless card for my desktop has been a nightmare. My USB wireless didn't work, ok, I'll find one that's compatible. Bought it. Didn't work. Oh, I have to buy the right version because some have different chipsets? Ok. Went to the Free Software Foundation's website, bought the card they recommended, double and triple checked the exact model number and everything was what they recommended, AND IT DOESN'T WORK! Went to Ubuntu Forums. Oh, here's the driver source you can recompile it. OMG, if the driver's open source why isn't it included!!! AAAAHHHHH!!!!!

But, in general, I like the Linux concept of including drivers so you don't have to spend your time tracking them down. Now if they just had more drivers so that everything was up and running hassle-free it would be perfect.

Re:Good news for competition

[Hucko]

Well done, I consider myself shot down.

Re:Good news for competition

[BGatesFan]

This is good news for Linux and OS X. Installing Drivers is so 1998.

In fact, surprising though it may be to you, getting drivers to work is often one of the biggest difficulties of installing Linux. The only thing that surprises me is how ugly you are, Bill Gates is even better looking!

Re:Good news for competition

[iamacat]

Even assuming your windows are that big, your code gives you 66 frames per second, while 30 are needed for smooth animation. And nobody said those intermediate frames while dragging a window have to be full quality and resolution. Your point?

Re:Good news for competition

[empaler]

This surprises me a little bit. Are you saying that the keyboard and mouse did not work at all or simply that the extra functions (like side scrolling and media buttons) didn't work? Sorry, I should have specified. The standard 2/102-button stuff worked fine. All the extra stuff (the reason I pumped $100 into the set) did not work. Not even the middle button. After fidgetting the drivers into Vista, only the "Magnifying" function did not work properly.

Re:Good news for competition

[RobertLTux]

A 3D accelerated desktop is still a matter of preference, if it isn't please let me know what Linux distros come with XGL/Compiz/Beryl as the default. And to say Aero is the norm is silly.
--------
umm i think that all of the Cool kids will have point an click Wizards to enable some sort of 3DAD and i know that if you install Mandriva 2007.0 and it sees your hardware is fully supported it will enable AIXGL >XGL > bare X.org - crash and burn as required (this should be even better when 2007.1 comes out.

Something's missing...

[bubbl07]

Unfortunately, there don't seem to be any printer drivers. The rest of the stuff seems fairly straight-forward to get, but printer drivers I think have been the bane of everyone's upgrade experience since Windows 98 or earlier. Thank goodness for hplip. However, that won't help me much when I start getting friends and family asking me to upgrade their computers to Vista despite all my year-old warnings. That'll be my cue to sit back smugly and laugh at them.

In any event, I'm sure there are many that will find this aggregation useful.

Re:Something's missing...

[dbIII]

Thank goodness for hplip

It's a pity HP sacked anyone that knows anything about Designjet plotter drivers a little while back. Even some of their current models listed as postscript are MS Windows only (and really don't understand postscript) and won't have any Vista drivers out anytime soon.

Re:Something's missing...

[Anonymous Coward]

It's a pity HP sacked anyone that knows anything about Designjet plotter drivers a little while back.

They did? How come?

challenging period

[Anonymous Coward]

From the site: "This FREE page lists the latest Windows Vista drivers and provides direct links to the files for downloads. We're offering this as a free service to the community, to help you all get through this challenging period of Vista-transitioning."

But all the links go to store.apple.com

I don't get it.

Drivers, Vista, Just Works (tm)

[Hucko]

This was just one of my gripes with Vista (the pre-release) was it would not recognise either of my network cards! The XP drivers didn't work with it either.

The site may work better with a search function and/or a listing by hardware. Windows people without the necessary drivers may be confused by the text names.

Re:Drivers, Vista, Just Works (tm)

[Hucko]

but Just Works (tm) was advertised for Vista...

Re:Drivers, Vista, Just Works (tm)

[porl]

as was 'plug and play' for win95...

Re:Drivers, Vista, Just Works (tm)

[Hucko]

Okay who on earth modded this informative? My XP drivers didn't work? it at best was interesting. Sheesh.

MIcrosoft not involved?

[mckniffen]

Why does it seem to me that Microsoft couldn't care less about vista. Vista has compatibility problems out the wazoo, and microsoft won't even host drivers on their web page.

Re:MIcrosoft not involved?

[Treates2]

if they didn't care so much about vista why would they spend so much time in making it uncrackable by hackers and pirates??

*waits to be proven wrong*

Re:MIcrosoft not involved?

[Hucko]

You can hold your breath now, I believe someone had already done it. Will I be sued if I google hacking Vista?
http://www.infoworld.com/article/07/02/01/HNvistas peechbug_1.html
http://www.pcworld.com/article/id,128115-c,hackers /article.html (okay so this isn't hacking per se, but a crack to make your system more vulnerable. Vista 'prevents' this with it's 'impressive' security)

Re:MIcrosoft not involved?

[sumdumass]

I doubt it is that they don't care. It is more like they were pressued to do something that didn't rely on years of experience. And they were against a deadline to get it done. Microsoft today is were linux was yesterday as far as having to play catch-up with itself. Even with all the beta testing which was likley opened to more people then the betas were for previous versions.

XP was devloped over 2000 wich was a continuation of NT. Some say Nt sucked and it took untill windows 2000 before it was good enough to use. 95 was simular to Vista except the Dos operating system they claimed it didn't run on but relied heavily on. Windows 98 was an improvment but it didn't start getting things really together until the second addition to 98. Me, well, It was an experiment gone bad for a lot of people that basicly made them decide to pull 98 into NT/2000 instead of keeping 98 and incorperating the good parts of NT/2000 to create XP.

Expect the same type of growning pains that were present in 95 combined with going from 95 to 98se. XP had the idea that it just worked going for it because a lot of the drivers were extentions to availible APIs wich meant that windows could genericly run most things easily and incorperate a lot of driver with little more then a config file to register it properly. Vista has something simlular from what I'm told but it isn't quite the same making this a do over from scratch for quite a few driver developers.

Re:MIcrosoft not involved?

[Anonymous Coward]

1. Microsoft cannot legally just download software from any arbitrary vendor and put it on microsoft.com.

2. Putting a driver on Microsoft's website is an endorsement of quality, which MS may not be able to make for any arbitrary driver.

3. The most recent driver is on the vendor's web site. The driver you find on microsoft.com may be days or weeks old.

In other words, MS does host drivers on their web site, but only those that vendors supply and pass certain QA tests. Since MS relies on vendors to submit the drivers and QA testing takes time, it is unlikely that MS will have the latest drivers. Thus, MS is not the best source of drivers.

dom

Re:MIcrosoft not involved?

[killjoe]

Why should they? Vista is going to get shoved down every fuck who buys a computer anyway so why should they do anything at all.

Re:MIcrosoft not involved?

[dabraun]

Me, well, It was an experiment gone bad for a lot of people that basicly made them decide to pull 98 into NT/2000 instead of keeping 98 and incorperating the good parts of NT/2000 to create XP.

This was *always* the plan. No one at microsoft ever seriously intended to "pull the good parts of NT/2000 back into 98 to create XP". If Microsoft could have pulled it off then Win2K would have meant the end of the 9x line, but it wasn't quite there yet.

9x was built for speed.

NT was built for stability.

(both were built before Microsoft realized how big of a can of security-related worms the internet was going to be)

The fundamentally different attitudes of the two teams when the two were being built in the first place (at around the same time) was enormous. NT people were disgusted with 9x design and implementation. 9x people knew that the NT approach would not provide what they needed to provide to "wow" people on the then-current hardware.

Re:MIcrosoft not involved?

[kingturkey]

Good news, all that work was for nothing as it's already cracked, you can install Vista without a CD key and they give you 30 days grace to enter your key, in which time you're allowed to download updates as if your version of Vista is activated. It is a fairly simple process to stop this countdown permanently at 30 days using a crack available on torrent sites.

Re:MIcrosoft not involved?

[rrshadow]

...and microsoft won't even host drivers on their web page. They do. http://www.microsoft.com/whdc/maintain/DrvUpdate.m spx (Microsoft delivers updated drivers for your devices through Windows Update.) Think it's any easy enough task to gather a list of 3rd party hardware driver links let alone provide the processes, infrastructure, and mechanisms for driver verification and testing and installation on millions of heterogenous computer systems from 3rd party device manufacturers with various degrees of driver development quality?

Nice idea, BUT...

[dr_wheel]

Why aren't these drivers listed alphabetically? http://www.radarsync.com/vista/vista_more.php?resu lt=0 And no search feature?

Re:Nice idea, BUT...

[Ydna]

So you have to stumble across the embedded ads in the list.

Re:Nice idea, BUT...

[kseise]

Of course you can search. Just bring up the page in Firefox and hit CTRL+F and then tell it what you want to find. OOS FTW!

Never mind Vista Drivers

[jaseparlo]

I've just spent two days trying to get XP working on a HP notebook that arrived here with Vista preinstalled. We can't and won't use Vista (no Novell support, and you wouldn't use an only-just-released OS in a corporate environment anyway), but the HP site doesn't offer any XP drivers for it's current models. Hunted around and managed to get drivers for most things, but the nvidia driver refuses to work...

I understand that M$ has forced the Vista install on vendors, but I don't understand why they can't make the rollback to XP an option for those of us that want/need it.

Re:Never mind Vista Drivers

[Osty]

Hunted around and managed to get drivers for most things, but the nvidia driver refuses to work...

Don't blame HP for that one. Blame nVidia's insistence that OEMs support mobile chipsets with their own "official" drivers (which the likes of HP/Compaq and Dell never keep up to date, of course). The thing is, mobile chipsets are generally no different from their desktop counterparts when it comes to drivers. For nVidia drivers, check out LaptopVideo2Go.com. For ATi, try DH Mod tool. In either case, the "problem" is that the inf for the drivers don't contain the right information to detect mobile chipsets, even though the drivers will work just fine on them. The "fix" is to hack the inf so that the installers will allow you to apply the drivers to your mobile card.

Re:Never mind Vista Drivers

[Anonymous Coward]

61xx (6100,6150) chipsets or its variants? Try an older Nvidia release, say the 70 series. The new 80 and 90 series wouldn't work at all on a system I have with integrated graphics.

Re:Never mind Vista Drivers

[Achromatic1978]

you wouldn't use an only-just-released OS in a corporate environment anyway

You wouldn't? Hint, I can think of a company with 70,000 employees that has Vista and Office 2007 deployed to the desktop, and has for a while now. ;)

It's made a little easier for us as we get access to a lot of drivers before the general public, though.

Re:Never mind Vista Drivers

[Anonymous Coward]

You wouldn't? Hint, I can think of a company with 70,000 employees that has Vista and Office 2007 deployed to the desktop, and has for a while now. ;)

Yeah, and we all see how well that's working out for them. Their latest "revolutionary" product is a few years late and way over budget. Maybe the GP has a point ;-)

Re:Never mind Vista Drivers

[Anonymous Coward]

What model was this notebook that you were having trouble finding XP drivers for?

Re:Never mind Vista Drivers

[ickoonite]

Rollback-to-XP options are definitely available - it may depend on how many systems you buy.

Re:Never mind Vista Drivers

[ettlz]

In either case, the "problem" is that the inf for the drivers don't contain the right information to detect mobile chipsets, even though the drivers will work just fine on them. The "fix" is to hack the inf so that the installers will allow you to apply the drivers to your mobile card.

That's right. Just to add a bit on: I get the latest nVidia drivers working on my notebook by unpacking both the recent executable and the one on the CD-ROM supplied with the notebook with 7-zip, copying the .inf file across, and then running the setup utility.

Re:Never mind Vista Drivers

[jaseparlo]

Sadly this'll be off the front page now, but I just wanted to say thanks! Who woulda thought whining on Slashdot would find me a solution!

Vista Drivers Page Necessary?

[RJBuild1088]

Why do third parties even need to complile these lists? Shoudln't Microsoft be on top of this?

Re:Vista Drivers Page Necessary?

[statusbar]

Soon, when Vista gets as many drivers as linux already has, perhaps Vista will be ready for the desktop!

--jeffk++

Re:Vista Drivers Page Necessary?

[zakezuke]

Why do third parties even need to complile these lists? Shoudln't Microsoft be on top of this?

It reminds me when win95 was new and I had a microtek 600z scanner, something I shelled out well over $400 for. Not scsi nor parallel. There technicaly was a beta driver burried deep in microtek's FTP site. It was a flacky piece of filth but was good enough... well... until scanner prices dropped. I'm sure others experenced annoyance with early generation scanners, even many scsi ones.

My point is i'm sure microsoft provides links to drivers which it takes the time to test for compatability, but one can not expect them to cover everything, esp not this soon into the release.

Even if they did, the drivers microsoft reccomends are not always the best.

Re:Vista Drivers Page Necessary?

[Achromatic1978]

Not scsi nor parallel.

So what the hell interface did it use? Did you think it mightn't be the wisest idea to purchase something with a wacky proprietary interface and hope that it'd support what was quite a dramatically changed operating system? :)

Re:Vista Drivers Page Necessary?

[DrKyle]

Wasn't there a time (back in this win95 era) that USB was the wacky new proprietary format?

Re:Vista Drivers Page Necessary?

[Kuciwalker]

Oddly enough, when I upgraded to Vista all I needed were graphics card drivers. I'd expected to spend forever hunting on the web (it's a notebook without a Vista-sticker, so the manufacturer won't provide Vista drivers), but even my wireless card worked out of the box.

Re:Vista Drivers Page Necessary?

[Kichigai Mentat]

I'm sorry... what!?

My point is i'm sure microsoft provides links to drivers which it takes the time to test for compatability, but one can not expect them to cover everything, esp not this soon into the release.

Even if they did, the drivers microsoft reccomends are not always the best.

Funny, because I remember people mentioning that Apple had plenty of time to test iTunes to make sure it worked with Vista. So, if that's true, why hasn't Microsoft had time to test drivers? And isn't it the manufacturer's job to provide drivers? If drivers aren't available through first party channels, why is the OEM even selling a machine where the hardware isn't supported by the software provided?

Re:Vista Drivers Page Necessary?

[zakezuke]

So what the hell interface did it use? Did you think it mightn't be the wisest idea to purchase something with a wacky proprietary interface and hope that it'd support what was quite a dramatically changed operating system? :)

The hell interface it used was so propriority I don't know the name of it. The adapter card was called the "Microtek, MS-PCY". This was just when twain was pretty new. I, after all, did buy the scanner before win95 was released, by a good couple of years.

It "may" have not been the best idea to go with something so proprietary, but oddly enough support for this wacko jacko interface was better than it's scsi counterpart. The hell version at least had a beta win95 driver which sometimes worked, and the proprietary scan software worked. This was sort of when twain was "newish", but the software I was using had direct support for this scanner.

Was it the best idea was buying this scanner? I "could" have gone with a scsi model but even scsi scanners had their issues. Ones from that time period were rather locked into using a host adapter based on the NCR xxc509 chipset, something which was painful to find. Just so happened media vision released one sound card with the NCR chipset onboard. But I had a choice... $400ish for this propriority scanner, or $800 for SCSI model which may or may not have been supported in the next generation of windows. It was faster for single pass, my software supported it directly without having to go through twain, a big bonus when scanning hundrads of pages for OCR. I saved enough money going propriority that buying another scanner 5 years which was less propriority cost less. I evaluated my options very carefuly, and made a reasonable choice based on what was available at the time period. It wasn't until win2k that I had to ditch that sucker, but 7 years is a good run for hardware.

Re:Vista Drivers Page Necessary?

[zakezuke]

Funny, because I remember people mentioning that Apple had plenty of time to test iTunes to make sure it worked with Vista. So, if that's true, why hasn't Microsoft had time to test drivers? And isn't it the manufacturer's job to provide drivers? If drivers aren't available through first party channels, why is the OEM even selling a machine where the hardware isn't supported by the software provided?

Firstly... i'm not sure that iTunes works with vista. I thought there were issues with iTunes and aero but I could be wrong. I don't use iTunes nor visa.

Second... if apple did test iTunes on vista, then they basicly tested one software package on one OS. Perhaps they even took the time to go with a few different PCs... but still one piece of software, on one OS, on a limited number of machines. Not every piece of hardware in existance.

And lastly... it's the hardware manufacturers job to make hardware. They do also either make the drivers, or outsource that to someone else, many times via microsoft. They are under no obligation to support your platform, only the platform they advertise it being compatable with. They are under no obligation to make drivers for something you already bought. How much hardware was tossed away between win3.1 and win9x? How much between win9x and win2k/xp?

Beta and XP drivers in many entries

[origamy]

Some of the entries point to Beta drivers. They should at least make a note on the website that the drivers are not final. Many of the drivers are XP drivers (the ZIP file contains WinXP in its name).

Users are better off just going directly to the manufacturer's websites. If drivers are Beta they may not find them easily, but at least they'll be warned. And if there's no Vista driver they won't download an XP driver and try to use it without warning.

Tip for Vista users

[alienmole]

You don't need this drivers page, all you need is to disable those pesky security dialogs and go surf the web for a while. Be sure to click "Yes" or "OK" on any messages that pop up. Pretty soon, everything you need to run Vista will be downloaded and installed on your machine automatically!

Re:Tip for Vista users

[apathy maybe]

I tried this. However, it didn't work. Might it have something to do with my geeky friend installing something called FireFox?

I made sure to click yes to everything, except that there was never anything to click yes too!?

Please inform me of what the problem is and what any possible solutions might be.

Re:Tip for Vista users

[alienmole]

You should remove Firefox immediately. Prolonged use of Firefox has been linked to reduction in compliant consumer behavior. The Attorney General's office keeps a close eye on people like that, and has suspended habeas corpus specifically to be able to deal with them more expeditiously.

For the full Windows Experience(tm), complete with commercial messages and free utility programs from our many, many affiliates, you must run Internet Explorer.

Google Cache

[Reo Strong]

http://72.14.203.104/search?q=cache:YltYVhNTm0gJ:w ww.radarsync.com/vista/+http://www.radarsync.com/v ista/&hl=en&ct=clnk&cd=1&gl=us&lr=lang_en&client=f irefox-a

Google Cache: you know, since I can't see the page anymore, maybe some of you can't either.

//no html skilz

Not that I love MS or anything...

[Twisted64]

Can I downgrade my OEM version of Windows Vista Business to Windows XP Professional?
Yes. OEM downgrade rights for desktop PC operating systems apply to Windows Vista Business and Windows Vista Ultimate as stated in the License Terms. Please note, OEM downgrade versions of Windows Vista Business and Windows Vista Ultimate are limited to Windows XP Professional (including Windows XP Tablet PC Edition and Windows XP x64 Edition). End users can use the following media for their downgrade: Volume Licensing media (provided the end user has a Volume Licensing agreement), retail (FPP), or system builder hologram CD (provided the software is acquired in accordance with the Microsoft OEM System Builder License). Use of the downgraded operating system is governed by the Windows Vista Business License Terms, and the end user cannot use both the downgrade operating system and Windows Vista Business. There are no downgrade rights granted for Windows Vista Home Basic or Windows Vista Home Premium.

Here.

Re:Not that I love MS or anything...

[dpilot]

It clearly appears that Microsoft is going to *force* Vista to be a success, and most likely they have the clout to do so.

But in this case, though you have the "right" to downgrade your system to XP Pro, do you have the capability do to so?

Drivers are always the thorn in the side, manufacturers would like to supply as few as possible. Now in order to make new sales with OEM Windows they *must* deliver Vista drivers. But no corporation deploys a new OS immediately, it's more likely to be 6-12 months, perhaps longer before corporate Vista rollouts begin. So for the next year or so, manufactures also *must* deliver XP drivers if they want to make new sales into corporate markets.

It's probably going to happen, and it's probably going to hurt Linux, because they're going to take their scarce/expensive resources and put them on 2 different Windows drivers, as opposed to 1 Windows and "everyone else."

Manufacture specific

[sieb]

Be careful, alot of these are manufacture specific, example: the Atheros drivers. I've been hoping to find some Atheros drivers that work in Vista on the Macbook that include a newer version of their Client software (old versions have all options greyed out), but the drivers on this site are for either IBM or Fujitsu laptops. Also keep in mind that many companies, like Atheros, don't release their own drivers publicly and instead rely on the hardware manufacture to maintain them.

Re:Manufacture specific

[Martin Blank]

Atheros drivers, while released by manufacturers, are usually pretty agnostic in the final installation, as they target the chipsets themselves. This happens often with pretty much everybody -- it's getting more and more rare for companies (especially video card manufacturers) to do any serious tweaking of the drivers, because they're running close to reference hardware. For wireless NICs, the changes are often minor such as slightly different transmit powers or more or less sensitive antennae, and have nothing to do with what the drivers cover.

Windows Update

[Anonymous Coward]

Windows Update does all this automatically. Worked for me perfectly on 4 different homebrew machines.

Re:Windows Update

[NerveGas]

Homebrew machines are where you would expect it to work relatively well - at least that has been my experience with Windows Update and drivers. Where you run into trouble is with more proprietary hardware - on my Dell laptop, for instance, I have yet to find a driver update on Windows Update, despite the fact that Dell comes out with them periodically.

On laptops, I've run into a few cases where the laptop manufacturer (or mainboard manufacturer, later to be packed into a laptop) has taken a device, and changed the PCI ID by one number without changing ANYTHING in hardware, specifically so the "regular" driver for that piece of hardware wouldn't install without some hacking.

Maybe...

[b1scuit]

I understand that M$ has forced the Vista install on vendors, but I don't understand why they can't make the rollback to XP an option for those of us that want/need it. ...they aren't allowed?

Like Linux 10 years ago

[Werrismys]

The simple fact that they can hope to list all drivers for a Windows platform speaks a lot of the state of Vista hardware support.

Wonder when we get www.vistaprinting.org, www.vistawireless.org, www.vista-laptop.net ...

Re:One Third of Germans Support National Socialism

[Hucko]

Okay that does it! Let's make all Germans wear a black eagle on a arm-band.

I see you are going to look for drivers on Vista

[Billly Gates]

Are you sure you want to visit this page?

I see you are about to install the driver? Are you really really sure?

32 bit only?

[louarnkoz]

I took a quick look at the list of drivers on the site, and it looks like a collection of x86 drivers designed for XP. What about 64 bit drivers? -- Louarnkoz

This Vista Driver Site runs on Linux/Apache :)

[Freshly Exhumed]

According to Netcraft the RadarSync site runs on Apache/2.0.40 Red Hat Linux:

http://toolbar.netcraft.com/site_report?url=http:/ /www.radarsync.com

Get off your high-horses

[DeviousDevil]

I had an XP machine and waited for Vista to get a brand new machine - custom built obviously not some Dell crap. In short I got a Core 2 Duo 6700, 3GB Ram, 80GB & 250GB SATAII drives, 8800 GTS Graphics, Creative X-Fi Elite Pro, ViewSonic 22" WS and I had an old HP Laserjet 6P printer and an HP PSC all-in-one via my home network already.

Out of the box every piece of hardware worked. The only thing I needed to get updated drivers for were the graphics and sound (beta ones still but they work). Printer, LAN, USB everything just worked.

Vista works well and I've had no problems. In fact on my old machine I had 2 items in device manager with exclamations and I never knew what the hell they were, in Vista (admittedly different hardware) not an exclamation in sight.

All the Linux fanboys on here must be real master dojo experts in it, because colleagues of mine who use Linux have told me about little issues like when upgrading the kernel to the latest version because it supported some more hardware and then existing hardware that previously worked stopped work, NICE!! What a lot of you guys forget is that there are millions (if not billions) of different hardware combinations of PC hardware out there and you're trying to make out that Linux is the saviour and will work on anything whilst laughing at Vista - you are bare-faced lying and you know it.

Vista may not work on everyones machines fully, you may even have to use a couple of beta drivers to start with but Linux is exactly the same. The only difference being that with Vista the situation WILL improve over time, not sure the same can be said for the next version of UBER-GIJoe Linux or whatever the current popular flavour is are you?

Re:Get off your high-horses

[Hucko]

no master dojo expert here... I'm teaching myself xhtml. I don't have any issues for hardware that has linux drivers written for it (video cards) and most of the hardware worked out of the box despite the lack of specific drivers. No problem upgrading to the latest verison kernel. Linux runs on more configurations than Vista will ever hope to. There will be more machines that will have Vista on it, but linux will be capable (as always) of running on it.

Every major release since 2004 of suse, ubuntu, mandrake, and knoppix have all run out of the cd with my machines (3) so far. I too have had to upgrade my nvidia drivers to have reasonably a good display, but I've had to do that with XP and Vista too. Vista also couldn't use either of my network cards, printer and scanner didn't work but drivers were available for download. Not so for the network cards. The difference? I can't see any logical reason to pay a company for software to not work with my computer, restricting my ability to use my computer as I wish.

My brother bought a Dell and has had no end of trouble. This on hardware "designed" for Vista. Don't be a mug, don't pay for beta.

The only difference being that with Vista the situation WILL improve over time, not sure the same can be said for the next version of UBER-GIJoe Linux or whatever the current popular flavour is are you?

Yes. I am sure the next version of n linux will improve over time. Hence my testimonial. I believe in open source philosophy, be that in linux/bsd/plan9/solaris/etc. I believe variety makes a better world than monopoly. I will learn/preach/teach open source until I am persuaded of a better path. More than likely I won't pay more than $70 for it.

Re:Get off your high-horses

[Anonymous Coward]

You are in a serious case of denial...

seek help

Re:Get off your high-horses

[Ash-Fox]

because colleagues of mine who use Linux have told me about little issues like when upgrading the kernel to the latest version because it supported some more hardware and then existing hardware that previously worked stopped work, NICE!!

2.4 to 2.6?

Although I haven't heard of this issue, there is nothing wrong with staying with your existing kernel version. It's not like you won't be able to run new software like you won't with Windows.

Vista may not work on everyones machines fully, you may even have to use a couple of beta drivers to start with but Linux is exactly the same.

The Linux kernel supports far more hardware than any version of Windows ever did. I disagree with your statement.

The only difference being that with Vista the situation WILL improve over time

I some how doubt I'll be able to use Vista decently on six year old hardware (which I tried) while I can already use Linux on the same six year old hardware with Beryl for those 'spiffy' effects (even though I don't care for them) decently.

Re:Get off your high-horses

[Hucko]

Enlighten me master.

Re:Get off your high-horses

[taoman1]

You're very brave to post this on /. You're right of course, but that doesn't usually matter here.

Re:Get off your high-horses

[mdhoover]

Heh

Because colleagues of mine who use Linux have told me about little issues like when upgrading the kernel to the latest version because it supported some more hardware and then existing hardware that previously worked stopped work, NICE!!

If your colleagues are compiling the kernel themselves they are obviously too stupid to perform the task and should stick with their vendor kernels. (hint, copy across the old .config to the new source tree, add new reqd devices during config)

What a lot of you guys forget is that there are millions (if not billions) of different hardware combinations of PC hardware out there and you're trying to make out that Linux is the saviour and will work on anything whilst laughing at Vista - you are bare-faced lying and you know it.

You mention only PC hardware.

Linux works on my Ultrasparc systems (fujitsu/Sun),DEC alpha, pocketpc (arm), beige powermac (albeit with flaky ADB), G4, G5 (w multilib userspace), amd64 (multilib userspace again) and mips (o32, n32 and 64 userspace) with support for pretty much all the hardware in said systems using no more than what comes in the kernel source tree.

Linux not only "fully works" for most hardware, but "fully works" across ALL of those architectures (well, the drivers for older apple gear are pretty shonky, but hey its not like apple publish specs) and provide identical userspace.

All microsoft have to worry about is x86/x86_64, and they cant even get that right.
Who is kidding who here about hardware support?

Re:Get off your high-horses

[DeviousDevil]

Since you clearly know so much answer me this...

Where do all these Linux drivers come from? Not from the hardware manufacturers (well a few perhaps like NVidia) that's for sure. Over the years I've had loads of pieces of PC hardware and virtually none of it has had Linux drivers on the CD out of the box.

MS software has in the past worked on Mips and Alpha but usually only the server versions not the ones destined for workstations. It is not up to Microsoft to provide hardware support! It is the hardware manufacturers!

I guess between the lines of my posts is just annoyance at a lot of posters here on ./.
Example - in one article there were loads of follow up comments complaining about the number of versions of Vista and how confusing this was. HELLO! How many different flavours of Linux are there? A damn sight more than Vista you can't argue with that it's a fact. Despite what people on here say about their mums, dads, cousins, grandmas etc.. the vast majority of people would not have the time, energy or know-how to work out how to get Linux going, with Windows it's a no-brainer.

Lastly if Linux is so brilliant, stable, secure and useable then why is it doing so bad against Windows on the desktop market?
Don't give me any of that bull about MS forcing Dell etc... to put it on there machines either. People still have to pay for it and as is often said Linux is free! Since it's free then why isn't it doing better? I know no one is going to agree (apart from one response to this message thread) but sometimes it is just sickening about how much MS hate there is.

Re:Get off your high-horses

[mdhoover]

Where do all these Linux drivers come from? Not from the hardware manufacturers (well a few perhaps like NVidia) that's for sure.

Here you are showing your ignorance. Manufacturers either provide source code for inclusion into the kernel tree, provide developers to work with the kernel team to port drivers, provide specs for the hardware so the kernel hackers can generate a driver for the kernel tree or the driver is contributed by the community after reverse engineering etc. Point being that a lot of the linux driver code is contributed by the manufacturers, peer reviewed and then merged into the linux kernel source tree itself. Out of tree binary blobs such as the Nvidia driver you mentioned are not the norm like in the windows world, we have a tendency to frown on things that we cant do a code audit on, especially code running in kernel space.

Despite what people on here say about their mums, dads, cousins, grandmas etc.. the vast majority of people would not have the time, energy or know-how to work out how to get Linux going, with Windows it's a no-brainer.

True, except for the non tech savvy I'd hand them a mac, it'll be an equivalent learning curve moving from XP to mac as it is from XP to Vista.

Lastly if Linux is so brilliant, stable, secure and useable then why is it doing so bad against Windows on the desktop market?

DirectX games, to a lesser extent MS Office file formats, also the learning curve but mostly because the user doesn't know any different. The average windows user is incredibly tolerant of shoddy software, virii, worms, blue screens, lockups and crashes, as they generally havent used anything else they believe this to be normal for an operating system, they dont know any better...

but sometimes it is just sickening about how much MS hate there is

I think you have mistaken my rubbishing of your driver/hardware support argument for hatred of the Beast from Redmond. This is not the case, I am ambivalent. I use whatever tool is the best fit for the job, if that means windows (as it usually does for standalone desktops) so be it. Linux desktop is still not quite ready for the masses for all tasks no matter what the zealots say.

But we were discussing hardware/driver support, not relative merit of each as a Desktop OS, (frankly they both suck but linux is a hell of a lot more robust). I suggest you take a closer look at the LKML mailing lists and see who contributes what when it comes to drivers before shooting off the uninformed drivel I quoted you on at the top.

Re:Get off your high-horses

[DeviousDevil]

Okay fair enough from what you've said here your not as bad as most /.'ers.

But come on, you are seriously joking about the drivers right?
Your talking about code, kernel, compiling etc... these are all words that the home market will not tolerate. They expect to just turn it on and have it work or automatically update itself. They don't expect to have to keep checking forums and websites on the off chance that - in your own words "Kernel Hackers" - have bothered to write drivers for there obscure cheap-o device they picked up. With Windows this doesn't happen drivers will be available immediately with the hardware out of the box. In the case of Vista out of it's box it does come with a hell of a lot of drivers. As I said I only had to get 2 - X-Fi Elite Pro and Nvidia 8800, the later being virtual bleeding edge tech so it's to be expected. Over the next few months what is the betting that all new hardware will come with Vista drivers?

I've had Windows since back in the day (v3.1) when it wasn't even an OS it was just a GUI on top of DOS, I've been through 95, 98, NT, 2000, XP and now Vista and I have never ever had a Virus. Since switching from 9x to an NT based system the only time I have ever had a BSOD was when using beta drivers for hardware. And in Vista when the NVidia driver screwed up the screen flickered off and then back on normal again before Vista told me with a balloon tip on the systray that the drivers had screwed up but it restarted them!

Until a Linux system can be fetched from a shop or come with a PC fully installed and Joe Bloggs can go to the shop and buy a new add-in device of some description and have it work out the box without having to trawl the internet then Linux will never beat Windows ever and with all the geeks and anti-MS people supporting Linux I can't see that changing any time soon.

Driver?

[iliketrash]

As a Macintosh user, I have to ask, what's a driver?

Re:Driver?

[Ash-Fox]

As a Macintosh user, I have to ask, what's a driver?

Usually binary code that determines how a computer will communicate with a peripheral device.

The lack of them on OS X (not drivers, but certain drivers that come with the OS) is the reason why so many peripheral devices have a warning label saying something similar to "Not compatible with Macintosh".

Re:Driver?

[Anonymous Coward]

As a Macintosh user, I have to ask, what's a driver? Its why over half the hardware you purchase doesn't work on your Mac.

Re:Driver?

[Anonymous Coward]

I knew you were a Macintosh user as soon as I saw your Slashdot nickname.

So, what you're saying...

[empaler]

... is that an OS from 2001 does not have the same level of hardware support as a freshly weeded Linux distro?
Microsoft, you bastards!

Re:So, what you're saying...

[Reliant-1864]

a freshly weeded Windows Vista wouldn't have any better support for that hardware. Could you even get it running on that? Microsoft makes the fiscally responsible decision to drop support for older hardware and focus on the newer stuff. Linux makes the quality responsible decision to support as much as possible.

Re:One Third of Germans Support National Socialism

[Anonymous Coward]

One third of Germans say that National Socialism and Adolf Hitler were "mostly positive" for Germany and "Entirely Disbelieve" the Holocaust lie, whereas a majority think Hitler was mostly positive and 45% think that the Holocaust is mostly untrue, a new poll of 3,000 Germans by the Metropol Institute indicates. I've been living in germany for more than 2 years already and I really doubt this... I've not found any single person that would agree with this...

Sorry, but I think there's been an oversite

[FoamingToad]

There's no indication whether the drivers are 32-bit or 64-bit - surely the drivers themselves are not cross-compatible?

Please correct me if I'm wrong here.

F_T

Whoever is crazy enough to download drivers

[slashdot.org]

Whoever is crazy enough to download drivers from places linked to by this site?

I mean, all good intentions aside, but drivers are binary files, it's rediculous enough that most of them aren't digitally signed even when downloaded from the original manufacturer. But explain why exactly this site is sending us to "files.3dnews.ru" to download ATI drivers???

Shit, I can't even come up with a hooker/unprotected sex analogy that's silly enough to describe this.

In any case, if this is the way for Vista customers to get their new purchase to work, then yeah, glory days for Linux ahead...

Re:Whoever is crazy enough to download drivers

[saintted]

Glory days for Linux indeed. More drivers released for Vista in the last couple of weeks than Linux drivers for the last 10 years. And none of the Vista drivers require you to recompile your kernel to get them working either.

Think I'll leave here for a little while ....

Re:Whoever is crazy enough to download drivers

[slashdot.org]

Glory days for Linux indeed. More drivers released for Vista in the last couple of weeks than Linux drivers for the last 10 years.

Yeah....

Ignoring the credibility and "quality vs. quantity" issues with your statement, the point is that so long as people revert to downloading binaries from unknown (untrusted) places and installing them on their system, we are still a long ways away from security being 'fixed' in Windows.

Not to say that the same issues couldn't arise with Linux, btw, they could, but (and I'm saying this as a predominantly XP user) it's less likely:

And none of the Vista drivers require you to recompile your kernel to get them working either.

Exactly; you'd rather download a binary blob from a random place and install it as an Administrator.

So to get back to the glory days for Linux,- (and the context in which I wrote it) in the long term, if Microsoft doesn't solve (instead of fix, which is too simple of a term considering the problem) the security issues with Windows, then I don't think it's a far stretch to predict that that will have positive effects on Linux's marketshare.

Re:Whoever is crazy enough to download drivers

[mobby_6kl]

Well, 3Dnews.ru is a serious russian tech news, review, and analysis site which keeps a nice archive of ATI/NVIDIA (and other) drivers dating back to the Detonator age so there shouldn't be any problems downloading there. But I agree with you on the general principle (not the day of Linux on desktop part) that the things you're expected to install as admin should be digitally signed, and preferably come from the manufacturer's site.

Re:Whoever is crazy enough to download drivers

[organgtool]

Shit, I can't even come up with a hooker/unprotected sex analogy that's silly enough to describe this.

Of course not! What you need is a car analogy. You can even combine the two ideas into a single analogy. For instance: Downloading Vista drivers from an unverified source is like a Hummer having unprotected sex with a Pinto.

Re:Whoever is crazy enough to download drivers

[kabocox]

I mean, all good intentions aside, but drivers are binary files, it's rediculous enough that most of them aren't digitally signed even when downloaded from the original manufacturer. But explain why exactly this site is sending us to "files.3dnews.ru" to download ATI drivers???

Shit, I can't even come up with a hooker/unprotected sex analogy that's silly enough to describe this.

Oh, damn now that made me actually think of one. All OS driver sex is bad because you just can't find "clean" virgins out there. Open source drivers are in theory "safer" as they'll let you check to see if they are either a virgin or clean of STDs or drugged up though no one really bothers with that when installing anything opensource. (They trust that some one else has checked so its safe.) In the closed source world, companies give out free fairly clean sex to only their customers though each companies method of finding these girls is completely obtuse and each of these girls is really picky and will only perform if you are exactly her type that doesn't apply if you've downloaded one of those unified universal drivers that applies to their entire product line, those girls will generally put out for any of their companies customers. Now, this site makes it easy to find these free and some times hard to find girls, but you don't know if these girls are the clean STD free girls just for you, or a STD/drugged up hooker lookalike that has been downloaded only by the most gullible.

How is that for a hooker/unprotected sex analogy?

Re:Whoever is crazy enough to download drivers

[Mex]

That was my same, exact thought.

A link on the Frontpage to a Russian site where you can download unsigned drivers? Why, that sounds like a GREAT idea! Do I have to enter my credit card to download?

Re:Whoever is crazy enough to download drivers

[Anonymous Coward]

files.3dnews.ru is like cnet here in Russia. Its a very reliable site.
If you go to ATIs site you'll see that they have no absolute path for the drivers. That means that a link to ATI's site for drivers wouldn't work.

Blame nvidia?

[empaler]

nvidia: We have two package options; Premium, where we provide the drivers directly to the end users and Basic, where we provide some binaries and some source to the OEM, and you then have to repackage and distribute your version of the drivers.
Dell: So, basically you're saying that we get to put our logo on more stuff, and save money in our end? W00+!

Idiots

[rudy_wayne]

Apparently, listing the drivers in alphabetical order is beyond the limited mental capacity of the idiot running that site. So I had to scroll through 6 pages of randomly listed drivers just so I could find out that the one I was looking for isn't there.

Thanks for nothing.

Comment removed

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

I'm glad this is finally out...

[mtec]

At last we have a list of these vista drivers! There is nothing more dangerous than people driving around, not paying attention and looking off in to the distance! Now you can tell if your neighbor or one of your family members is a vista driver. People that drive like this are a traffic hazard and a menace to society! Why, just the other day, I was driving to work and beside me was someone - not paying attention - looking off into the dist...
What? what do you mean? oh... not those drivers? Vista is a what? Oh. ok. Sorry. I use a Mac. I didn't know...

...
Nevermind.

Certainly sounds good for Microsoft

[ktraglin]

Apparently, they need all the help they can get with Vista, particularly in light of the advancements of Linux, BSD (& OSX), Solaris, etc.

Well somebody has to say it...

[capn_buzzcut]

I for one embrace our new Windows Vista driver download site overlords. Me clicky clicky

Indeed.

[sketchman]

Who was the idiot in that little story again?

Re:I see you are going to look for drivers on Vist

[Digz]

I don't see why everyone bashes this so much. My Ubuntu install works in a very similar manner. Whenever anything needs root privileges it pops up a password dialog (unless, of course, I'm in a shell and have to sudo instead), but you don't hear everyone yapping all day about "Synaptix needs root privileges, please enter your password".

Everyone's been barking about Windows running as root constantly, and now that they've changed that model everyone barks because Windows prompts you before it runs something with root access. Come on.

Re:One Third of Germans Support National Socialism

[Anonymous Coward]

Literally translated from German: The Spammer

Doesn't work for Logitech QuickCam

[brian0918]

I just tried using those drivers for a Logitech QuickCam, but it still wouldn't install. I also tried going through Logitech's site and getting the Vista x64 drivers; still didn't work.

Re:I see you are going to look for drivers on Vist

[iago-vL]

I see you are about to install the driver? Are you really really sure?

I'm pretty sure that the case of installing a driver is one of those places that you want your OS to prompt you.

Re:I see you are going to look for drivers on Vist

[Anonymous Coward]

Have you ever actually used Vista? Or are you just scooping up Apple FUD?

I've been running Vista for a couple of months now at work. After setup, during which I *want* to be given UAC prompts to install applications & drivers, I probably average one prompt/week. Literally. And sometimes this prompt is the result of Adobe Acrobat trying to auto-update itself, which I don't exactly blame on Microsoft.

I'm sorry, but I will never buy an Apple product as long as their ads are baseless and immature.

lol

[crabpeople]

Wow. You baught a PC from a store, configured, and you are bragging that it works? They would obviously sell you parts that all had some form of driver support. Especially considering you are in that small section of the market that makes stupid hardware decisions, buying the most advertised products. (3gb ram? 500 dollar video card? 400 dollar sound card!?).

"on my old machine I had 2 items in device manager with exclamations and I never knew what the hell they were"

So you dont know how to properly install drivers in your OS. And vista fixed this as it was pre installed. Just so were all clear on what your saying there, and your not actually blaming xp for you not installing the correct drivers.

 

"colleagues of mine who use Linux"

Hmm thats a rather trollish sentance. Is this just a troll post?

 

"The only difference being that with Vista the situation WILL improve over time, not sure the same can be said for the next version of UBER-GIJoe Linux or whatever the current popular flavour is are you?"

yep.

Re:lol

[DeviousDevil]

My new machine was custom built to my spec'.

I installed Vista myself, which is no claim to fame as it is so simple to install a blind monkey could do it. The thing about XP device manager vs. Vista was simply making the statement that Vista comes with plenty of drivers. Some people were trying to make out that included drivers were rubbish.

No this is not a troll post, I'm just sick of reading Linux fanboys making out how Linux is so good whilst Windows is rubbish, but glossing over the fact that there are several things which Linux isn't great on. I think one of the other posts on this article was something to do with all the tons of different ways to install software and how the different methods don't sit well together. Well quite simply put in Windows you never have to care about this you just run the set-up program, follow the prompts and your done.

Funny how comments that aren't slagging MS get critised as trolling. I admit I don't know much about Linux other than other colleagues of mine (I work in I.T.) tell me and some of them use a flavour of Linux as their main OS.

It's very simple

[Anonymous Coward]

1. Get off horse
2. Seek help

Now that was easy....
Anything else?

Re:It's very simple

[Hucko]

Which I did. I asked for help, which by definition required me to follow the 2 step process; the directive was repeated. Considering my computer is working, I am confused where the alleged denial begins. So enlighten me.

Have you used Vista?

[bogie]

The amount of prompting is just silly.

Re:I see you are going to look for drivers on Vist

[friedmud]

Have you actually used Vista?

I know they have dialed it down some since I last used it (I used some of the first public betas as my main Windows OS for a couple of months last year) but when I was using it, it would ask about _EVERYTHING_.... and I really mean everything. It was unbelievable how often it would ask... and was definitely really annoying.

I know that windows needs to get more secure, and one way of moving towards that goal is to have these nag screens.... but after using it for a while I really wonder why they couldn't come up with something better....

Friedmud

spyware

[Anonymous Coward]

Trying to go to this site, Trend Micro Internet Security 2007 stopped me from forward, citing spyware detected on the site; it wasn't claiming a proxy issue - it was actually reporting spyware detected.

I might not download drivers from these guys.

Re:I see you are going to look for drivers on Vist

[Digz]

Quite honestly, it has changed a lot. I'm running RC1 right now, and (like I stated before) the prompting really isn't any more intrusive than on Edgy. To tell the truth, I was rather surprised.

It's also a lot faster than it used to be. Beta 2 was pretty much unusable to me on my old machine (a 2.4 GHz with 1.2GB of RAM). That was almost enough for me to write it off for good. But a friend of mine just bought a Vista laptop with 1 GB of RAM, and it was surprisingly responsive (especially after the fiasco I had with Beta 2). So I gave my RC1 disk a whirl, and was pleasantly surprised.