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Listing of Vista Drivers

Posted by kdawson on from the crib-sheet dept.

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.

10 of 161 comments (clear)

  1. Can become outdated fast by aliatgb · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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a good idea in theory but I would not recommend anyone to a site like this one for fear that they could be downloading outdated drivers since the manufactures site lists the current ones anyway.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.

    1. Re:Can become outdated fast by deft · · Score: 3, Insightful

      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      so, whent he problem that they cant be found is outdated, you wont have to go to this site anyways.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.

      --

      There's nothing Intelligent about Intelligent Design.
    2. Re:Can become outdated fast by echo_kmem · · Score: 5, Insightful

      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.
    3. Re:Can become outdated fast by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Insightful
      "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.

    4. Re:Can become outdated fast by griffjon · · Score: 5, Insightful

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

      --
      Returned Peace Corps IT Volunteer
  2. Something's missing... by bubbl07 · · Score: 3, Insightful

    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.

  3. Never mind Vista Drivers by jaseparlo · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.
  4. Re:Good news for competition by phantomfive · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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
  5. Re:Good news for competition by nmb3000 · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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
    /)
  6. Whoever is crazy enough to download drivers by slashdot.org · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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...