Solo Technology

For Want of Drivers… the OS was lost.
- farewell to Vista oration, early Sunday morning

I really enjoyed my brief affair with Microsoft Vista — a lot more than I would have expected. However, I’m switching my laptop back to XP.

Why? Drivers.

I have one device that I flat out can’t find drivers for. My attempt to try the XP drivers failed. Now for perspective, this is my built-in 4-in-1 card reader so not the end of the world, by any means. A minor annoyance at best.

Then I tried the bluetooth USB adapter that I just bought a week ago. While the vendor has Vista flavored drivers available on the web, I’ve blown over 3 hours trying to get them to work. I think I have the USB adapter properly recognized, but plugging it in causes 3 more “unknown” devices to pop up in the device manager and I can’t track ‘em down. And they apparently are critical as there’s no bluetooth lovin’ going on.

I bought that thing specifically to use it. A lot. Thus…

Back to XP I go.

Next time I’ll pay a lot more attention to the Windows Vista Upgrade Advisor — and I’ll be sure to have all the USB toys plugged in when I run it!

[ok, Linux guys, ease up with the "install linux instead" comments! When I can easily run OneNote connected to my corporate shares, I'll consider it. Until then, linux will remain as a dual-boot option that can't recognize the damned ethernet adapter.]

5 Responses to “For Want of Drivers…”

1. Shahid Shabbir on August 19th, 2007 11:55 pm
   

   My better half bought a new HP laptop with Vista. Being a pretty geeky girl, she tried out all her apps, found numerous issues, restored to factory defaults a few times and ended up disgusted with that abortion known as Vista. Email to HP support did no good at all.

   However, we saw a posting saying to call them, and they would email a list of download links for every single driver needed by XP, which they did. A new XP install and 14 drivers later, she now has a machine fully functional and stable as a rock.

2. Rich G. on August 20th, 2007 6:20 am
   

   My first install of Vista was an upgrade. It didn’t not go well.

   I tried to downgrade to XP, XP couldn’t see my HD any more. Win98 could, and installed to it, still XP didn’t believe I had a HD installed. Ubuntu could see it (livecd) but XP couldn’t. Something was up with my mbr I was sure. Something Vista had done.

   Finally I gave up, needed the computer, badly for work, reinstalled vista, clean install this time.

   Mostly worked. Video drivers didn’t though. No games were playable.
   So, uninstalled all video drivers, removed them, deleted their directory and used “default driver” for a boot, refusing to install drivers while I purged drivers. Finally. Installed NEW drivers on clean install. The new drivers what wouldn’t install over the old drivers DID install over default drivers. Now I think games will work.
   I was going to make this a post. See what you did. I recommend clean install over upgrade. Upgrade was horrible for me. clean install is running really well, and might be something I can live with. I’m giving it a month. If it doesn’t work I’ll rip the HD out and throw it in the river and get a newer, bigger, faster one to install XP onto.
   Overall I’d give Vista upgrade a D- for useability.

   I’d give Vista clean a C . I’d do both higher if the OS hadn’t gotten more complicated.

   I can’t think of a single reason why the Display properties tab has to be so many places now.

   I can’t abide that STUPID “Are you sure” prompts. If you “Enable Click and Drag on start menu” I still had to click THREE confirmation boxes to move something from one folder to another. I eventually turned it off. A feature that could have been useful is now disabled because it’s stupid in execution but not in concept.

3. Chris on August 20th, 2007 9:41 pm
   

   *phew* My experience was nowhere near as awful as what you two wrote!

   I actually enjoyed my experience, aside from my complete inability to get that dang bluetooth adapter to work.

   Rich, I wouldn’t blame you if you recycled that into a post.

4. andrew on October 27th, 2007 4:38 am
   

   sry~can send me c714 xp driver to me?i really need it,i find 2 week already…

5. » pingback » Remote Desktop - Lose the Security Warning » Solo Technology on November 13th, 2007 9:29 am
   
   

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