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Old peripherals depended on how greedy the company was. If they wanted more sales, they didn't write new drivers.

The simplest thing to do, would have been for microsoft to make vista so it could have used xp drivers.

In just about every new OS, most of the drivers would work. From NT 4 - 2000, from 2000 - xp. But not from NT 4 - xp.

But making stuff reverse compatible would have been to simple.

As for IE 9 - microsoft can keep it. I think I'll pass.
 
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The simplest thing to do, would have been for microsoft to make vista so it could have used xp drivers.

But making stuff reverse compatible would have been to simple.

If they did that, it wouldn't be Vista, it would be XP. Since we already had XP, they decided to make Vista ;^)
 
If they did that, it wouldn't be Vista, it would be XP. Since we already had XP, they decided to make Vista ;^)

When XP was released, for a lot of situations XP could use windows 2000 drivers, and nobody ever complained.

I do not ever remember reading a complaint that backwards compatible drivers are bad. In fact, for the most part people liked it.
 
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When XP was released, for a lot of situations XP could use windows 2000 drivers, but nobody ever complained.

I do not ever remember reading a complaint that backwards compatible drivers are bad. In fact, for the most part people liked it.

Windows 2000 was the same os as XP, version 5 of windows.

Just like vista and 7 are version 6, thats why drivers on 7 and vista work together.

98 to 2000 though was a nightmare, just like xp to vista.
 
I dont know what planet your from, but where I live, XP is a rock solid OS. And guess what, drivers with xp actually work. Vista took years to catch up to xp just in driver support.

I skipped Vista and went from XP to 7. But I know lots of people who used and liked Vista and never had any issues with drivers or stability. I guess YMMV.
As for IE9, I just installed it a week ago and have been using it a lot. It seems to be an excellent browser and almost as good as FF. Of course FF 4 is about to come out so I'll probably shift over to it soon. Love Firefox!
 
I'll probably still stick with firefox. The addon community is amazing. Ad block pro, noscript and downloadhelper are 3 addons that I don't think I could browse without now. Less essential are my profile manager, weather addon and skin. Being able to customize the browser is important to me. IE addons seem too commercial for me or something. It feels as if they are only designed to make money, not really to be functional.
 
Firefox is the clear winner for features. It might not be the fastest, but you can turn it into anything you want.
 
Firefox is the clear winner for features. It might not be the fastest, but you can turn it into anything you want.

I only turn on FF when I need to use FireBug or Selenium IDE, thats about it. But even FireBug may no longer be needed as IE's developer tools do everything FireBug does, I'm just used to using FireBug.

IE9 all the way now, even Chrome seems slow compared to it.
 
Years? Seriously?! Vista worked from the start. Some people had issues with drivers, but I didn't. Any new peripherals worked fine with Vista. Old peripherals depended on how greedy the company was. If they wanted more sales, they didn't write new drivers. I had a Microtek scanner that didn't have 64bit drivers for anything, and a garbage ATI TV tuner card, that worked like shit in XP, and not at all in Vista. Otherwise everything worked out of the box from before launch.

That's not the experience I ran into... on my system, Vista initially had flaky video drivers, flaky audio drivers, flaky USB drivers, and no drivers at all for my printer.

I had no practically no problems like this with Windows 7.
 
That's not the experience I ran into... on my system, Vista initially had flaky video drivers, flaky audio drivers, flaky USB drivers, and no drivers at all for my printer.

I had no practically no problems like this with Windows 7.

Win7=Vista. The manufacturers had an extra 3 years to get their shit together. Any driver issues with Vista was due to the hardware manufacturers dropping the ball. I was running Vista 6 months before release. That means the devs had a minimum of 12 months to get their drivers in order. There was no excuse for not having good drivers, and it definitely wasn't Vista's fault.
 
Win7=Vista. The manufacturers had an extra 3 years to get their shit together. Any driver issues with Vista was due to the hardware manufacturers dropping the ball. I was running Vista 6 months before release. That means the devs had a minimum of 12 months to get their drivers in order. There was no excuse for not having good drivers, and it definitely wasn't Vista's fault.


Your on about this, many people forget about the migration to XP and all the driver issues people had with it. I had an Epson scanner 3 years old and epson never made drivers for XP. It is all money driven, they do not make drivers so many people will buy new gear.
There is a lot shit that is Micro$ofts fault but compatibility is not one.

I actually run Vista Ult. on my Desktop and had my laptop on it also. I have 7 on my laptop now and am thinking about going to Vista. Never had a problem with Vista
 
Your on about this, many people forget about the migration to XP and all the driver issues people had with it. I had an Epson scanner 3 years old and epson never made drivers for XP. It is all money driven, they do not make drivers so many people will buy new gear.
There is a lot shit that is Micro$ofts fault but compatibility is not one.

I actually run Vista Ult. on my Desktop and had my laptop on it also. I have 7 on my laptop now and am thinking about going to Vista. Never had a problem with Vista

I didn't really have problems getting drivers for XP early on, since the Windows 2000 drivers normally worked.
 
The simplest thing to do, would have been for microsoft to make vista so it could have used xp drivers.

In just about every new OS, most of the drivers would work. From NT 4 - 2000, from 2000 - xp. But not from NT 4 - xp.

But making stuff reverse compatible would have been to simple.

As for IE 9 - microsoft can keep it. I think I'll pass.

Actually for most everything except for some crappy HP printers, XP drivers DID work on the 32bit version of Vista. However, there were a lot of things which did not work in the 64bit version, because there were no drivers. I fail to see how that is Microsoft's fault however. If they didn't make the move to 64bit people would have complained also. Both Vista and 7 have been made in both 64bit and 32bit flavors to work on older hardware. Eventually though, Microsoft has to stop supporting old crap.
 
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When XP was released, for a lot of situations XP could use windows 2000 drivers, and nobody ever complained.

I do not ever remember reading a complaint that backwards compatible drivers are bad. In fact, for the most part people liked it.

The wireless card I had never had XP drivers made and 2000 drivers did not work. XP had made improvements on the way wireless worked and new drivers had to be made. The same was true with Vista. For improvements to be made some driver backwards compatibility had to have been lost. Windows 7 hasn't had any complaints because there were already drivers out for Vista and 7 is just Vista with a facelift.

98 to 2000 though was a nightmare, just like xp to vista.

This is true. People always praised XP because everything worked. Well it worked because most drivers had already been made for 2000. However, I got Win2k when it first came out and it was a nightmare trying to get any of my hardware to work. I stuck with 98SE for a long time because of that reason. Eventually I upgraded the hardware which was incompatible.
 
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