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Can become outdated fast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a good idea in theory but I would not recommend anyone to a site like this one for fear that they could be downloading outdated drivers since the manufactures site lists the current ones anyway.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Re:Can become outdated fast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so, whent he problem that they cant be found is outdated, you wont have to go to this site anyways.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Re:Can become outdated fast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Re:Can become outdated fast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Re:Can become outdated fast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Re:Can become outdated fast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

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

[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

[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

[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.

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.

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.

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?

[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:Nice idea, BUT...

[Ydna]

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

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]

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

[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.

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]

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!

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.

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.

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?

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!

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: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".