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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.
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a good idea in theory but I would not recommend anyone to a site like this one for fear that they could be downloading outdated drivers since the manufactures site lists the current ones anyway.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.
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.
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.
Communism, its a party!
So you have to stumble across the embedded ads in the list.
"The great thing about multitasking is that several things can go wrong at once." -me
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.
All available data suggest that regardless of any of this, the sun will still come up tomorrow.
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.
Qxe4
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.
"What do you despise? By this are you truly known." --Princess Irulan, Manual of Muad'Dib
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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. 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.
Semi-automatic amateur armchair Australian philosopher; conjecture ready at any moment...
> 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.
I hope, when they die, cartoon characters have to answer for their sins.
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?
There is no sanctuary. There is no sanctuary. SHUT UP! There is no shut up. There is no shut up.
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?
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...
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".
Change is certain; progress is not obligatory.