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

Good news for competition

[JPMaximilian]

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

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.

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: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

[griffjon]

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