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

Is my current software compatible with Vista?

by Lee Koo (ADMIN)  - 3/7/07 1:43 PM

Question

Here's a question I have yet to see discussed anywhere. While there is a lot of discussion of the question, "Is your PC ready for Vista?", nowhere have I seen a discussion of whether your SOFTWARE is ready for Vista. In past upgrades I remember seeing many examples of software incompatibility moving from one version of Windows to the next. How can I tell if I will have any software incompatibility issues if I upgrade to Vista?

Submitted by: Art S. of St. Louis, Missouri


Answer voted most helpful by our members:

I hate to say it Art, but the bottom line is you will not know for sure what software is compatible with Windows Vista until you actually try it. Not only does it depend on what exact software version you have but also how you as an individual, use that software. You may not run into any issues while using just the basic features of a specific software but find all kinds of problems when you go to use some of the more advanced functions. It is often difficult to isolate just the software without including some aspect of hardware or at least peripherals. Especially if you consider drivers to be a form of software. The best recommendation I have for you is to:

1. Download and Run Windows Vista Upgrade Advisor. This will give you some idea but have found that it misses a lot as well.

2. Check the website for each and every software program that you plan to use for updates, known problems, and/or issues with Vista.

3. Search your favorite forums for problems that others may be having.

4. Download and install the latest updates for all individual software programs that you plan to use.

Not to bore you with the details of my week, but the easiest way to explain it, is to give you some examples. I setup and installed 9 new Vista computers this last week and had slight problems with every one of them. Now what I might consider to be a slight problem, may be really major to you. But you can decide for yourself. Please keep in mind that drivers and patches are coming out every day and some of these issues may even have been corrected by the time you read this or I simply did not have time to find a solution. Here is what I ran into:

• HP Photosmart Printer – No Vista drivers available yet, but HP had a work around to be able to just print to it without other features.

• HP Photosmart 2610 All-in-one – No Vista drivers yet, but HP had a work around to be able to just print. Quick buttons on printer do not work but you can use Windows Fax and Scan (Not available on Vista Basic) to force it to scan.

• HP V90 All-in-one Printer – No Vista drivers yet, but HP had a work around to be able to print. Quick buttons on printer do not work but you can use Windows Fax and Scan (Not on Vista Basic) to force it to scan.

• Handspring Visor PDA – Could not get it to Sync yet. Customer did not want me to spend any more time on it.

• Canon Rebel XT Camera – Vista Compatible Software not available for working with Raw format as yet.

• Sony USB thumb Drive – Would not install and Vista could not find drivers for it. Another brand worked fine. Don’t know why?

• Quicken 2007 Install – During installation, the update seemed to stall and reported not responding, so I killed the application. Quicken did not work and could not be uninstalled or reinstalled at this point. I checked their website and found that this is a common problem in Vista and even if update appears to stall you have to wait up to 2 hours for it to complete. So I had to download Quickens uninstall program and ran a Windows installer repair utility to get me back to being able to reinstall Quicken.

• Linksys USB Wireless Adapter – No Drivers from Linksys for this model, so I installed new internal PCI Wireless Adapter that did haveVista Drivers.

• Belkin PCI Wireless Card Ver 5100 – No Vista drivers for this version of this card, I had to replace the Bekin card with a Linksys Card and download new Vista Drivers.

• Brand New Dell with Errors – 3 brand new Dell’s all had Sonic Solutions driver errors on boot right out of the box. I had to download patches from Roxio to correct the problem.
• Epson Perfection 1650 scanner – No Drivers for Vista as yet. I have not found a work around as yet.

• Logitech QuickCam Pro 4000 – No Vista drivers yet, Logitech suggests purchasing a new Vista ready webcam. (What a Surprise)

• Palm Z22 PDA – Could not get it to sync with Vista. I ran out of time and did not investigate this issue as yet.

• Mozzilla Firefox – Customer wanted Firefox but had read about some issues with Vista, so decided not to install until we know more.

• Hp Laserjet 4m – Could not install. This had nothing to do with Vista but more to do with many new computers in general. This computer did not come with parallel printer ports and this printer does not have USB.


Please note that these were all issues that came up while setting up brand new Vista computers and mixing in some older hardware and software. People, well at least my clients, don’t seem to be upgrading computers to Vista, but rather are just waiting until they purchase a new computer to make the transition to Vista. For Obvious reasons if you purchase a new Vista computer with all new Hardware and Software and don’t reuse any of your old stuff, then you will probably have fewer problems And is this not what every manufacturer would like you to do? From what I have seen so far, manufacturers don’t seem to be jumping on creating fixes for older software and hardware as vigorously as they did when Windows XP was released , but want to force use to buy new Vista compatible items. Now if software prices would only come down the way hardware has, we would be all set. $679 for Microsoft Office 2007 Ultimate? You can almost buy 2 new computers for that…


Submitted by: Dana
Wayland Computer


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