Community Newsletter: Q&A: Is my current software compatible with Vista?

Windows Vista and Software Compatibility

In reply to: Is my current software compatible with Vista? by Lee Koo (ADMIN) 

You can bet that there will be some software incompatibility issues to be dealt with in moving from an earlier version of Windows to any version of Vista. This is particularly true if you have older versions of your existing software installed, rather than the latest version in each case.

Microsoft makes available their Vista Upgrade Advisor, available here (http://www.microsoft.com/windows/products/windowsvista/buyorupgrade/upgradeadvisor.mspx), which will examine your current machine, hardware and software, to determine its upgradeability. It will give you an initial indication of any hardware or software with which Vista might have issues, and in some cases can recommend a solution.

Searching for information on particular products can be done using a good search engine, or by visiting the websites of the software publishers to check on their own status reports for Vista compatibility. Also, Microsoft has just recently made available a couple of lists, of applications that are certified to run on Vista and apps that are known to work with Vista.

Anyone contemplating upgrading to Vista should carefully weigh the two alternatives, upgrading in place and installing clean. While upgrading in place may seem the better course, almost all the reports that I have read, as well as my own experience working with both beta and final versions of Vista, tell me that a clean install on a freshly formatted hard drive is the path most likely to minimize problems. Insure that your hardware is up to the task of operating with Vista (CPU, RAM, hard drive space, video card, etc.), install clean, and then reinstall your applications. If you have a second PC available, you can offload all your data files to it for temporary storage. If that's not an option, using something like a flash drive or an external hard drive will preserve your data. Once Vista and your applications are installed and updated, you can then move your data back from your temporary storage and you should then have a solid, stable system upon which to work.

Compatibility issues will likely be the bane of people moving to Vista for quite a while. Vista's security model, as well as changes in its graphic environment, mean that a lot of the older programs that we use may need to run in a "compatibility mode." Fortunately, this is fairly well executed, and can allow incompatible applications to be used until they're upgraded or replaced with something else. UAC confirmation boxes that take over the system when running older applications may take some getting used to, but each user will have to decide for him- or herself whether the extra security afforded by UAC is worth the in-your-face quality of these prompts. Finally, some applications may put Vista into a compatible graphics mode, disabling Aero Glass. I'm not sure if there's any predicting when this will happen, but it is something that I've experienced a few times, and can be rather disconcerting, if you're not aware of its possibility.

Good luck on your move to Vista.