Question about Windows Vista

[XA04]

Well Windows Vista is around the corner soon. One of the things that worry me if I were to switch over is drivers; AFAIK there isn't any drivers for my printer and steering wheel (although I think the steering wheel will get drivers made eventually), will I be able to use the drivers for Windows XP in Windows Vista?

If so.. great. But another problem is, there are no drivers for my printer for the 64 bit edition of Windows XP. I have a 64 bit processor, so I'd love to take advantage of the 64 bit edition of Vista, but as there are no 64 bit drivers for my printer I doubt I'll be able to get any for vista.


Is there any possible work arounds for this? Maybe some sort of *universal* driver? (obviously this would probably be very buggy but if it worked it would be better than nothing!)


Sorry for the very long boring post.

Thanks!

[charleski]

Vista drivers will appear for current hardware, but will take time. Drivers for older hardware depend on how dedicated the manufacturer is to supporting their product, I'm sure that many will never see a Vista driver.

I don't know of any workarounds ATM, and doubt that any will surface, given the proprietary nature of these things.

[TheAnimus]

well vista is only RTM atm, (gotta love TLAs)

So no.

But you might find some things can be made to work with a quick google, most printers can be hacked, if the manifacturer has one driver for their range (most printers use the same "instruction set" just have different limitations). A google might help you find this for your specific model.

The stearing wheel should work, as if its a USB one, it will use a HID class. You might just lack configuration software. This is the universal driver

[Funkstar]

If it is an HP printer you are probably SOL. They dumped support for a load of multi function printers when XP came out because they never bothered to port the driver from 2000 (or was that 2000 from NT, can't remember now).

the retail version of vista may well come with basic driver support out of the box anyway, every other version of windows has had an ever increasing list of supported hardware out of the box, especially things like printers etc.

[XA04]

Yeah the printer is a HP one. Its not a very old printer, but the drivers can be a pain to find sometimes (I think I've only ever found one working mirror on the internet for them).

Thanks for the info.