Monday, April 16, 2007

Vista - second impressions

We've been using Vista for a couple of months now and in general like what Microsoft have done. However, a few issues have come to light, particularly with hardware. It seems that a number of hardware manufacturers are slow in releasing Vista drivers to allow their products to work with the new OS.

A point in case came to light last week when a customer asked us to install his newly-purchased Hewlett-Packard 1018 Laserjet printer. When we got it hooked up and inserted the driver disk it came to light that there were no Vista drivers supplied. OK, we thought, they probably have them posted on the HP website. After a bit of a rummage about we found a listing of Vista-supported printers and the 1018 was not on it. Further rummaging found a listing of soon to be supported printers and the 1018 was on that list. In the absence of a Vista driver you can try the XP driver which might work, the website declared, So we did, and it didn't.

The customer's only solution was to return the printer and exchange it for a Samsung 2010 printer which had downloadable Vista drivers. So, the message is, before you run out and buy a Vista PC, check whether your existing peripherals (printer, scanner, webcam, mp3 player, etc.) will be supported, otherwise you may have to budget for replacement peripherals as well.

2 comments:

Lifetheuniverseandeverything said...

Hi - I'd completely agreed that for me anyway, Vista is by far a better OS and look. I have also had driver issues and still have some at the moment. In fact, I'm waiting on Toshiba to update the drivers specic to my laptop's utilities... again, they're listed as being on the waiting list.

One great feature of Vista though is Readyboost. Its the feature which allows the use of external memory in the form of a USB Stick or SD Memory chip to extend the systems RAM (virtually). It really speeds up the system and if, like me, you don't have a state of the art PC, then its a cheap and affective alternative.

Overall, I like it...

Armand said...

I was in the process of looking at a mac. But with Leopard moving out till October a PC is coming back into focus. The points you make are actually quite improtant and while I dont think I have any peripherals that woudl casue issue, it is making me think.