Windows 7 with old hardware

Will it in Windows 7 be better with old hardware drivers. I mean, many devices I tryd to install on Windows Vista wouldn't work cause there were only drivers for windows xp. That my only complain about Vista. Will it in W7 be better?

Unfortunately not, as if you can't get a device to work in Vista it probably won't work in Windows 7. If it's down to application compatibility, there are some improved tools such as XPM which allow you to emulate a Windows XP environment in Windows 7 to run software.

You might give it a shot as I have several Windows XP drivers running on Windows 7 between all of my systems. They're happy as a clam.

As Thrax says, you can try using XP drivers but I wouldn't suggest it. I don't think even compatibility mode emulation will allow XP 32bit drivers to run on a Windows 7 64bit machine.

It's like Microsoft doesnt think about these problems at all. It's not that it is inpossible to program it in a operating system, right?

It's not all the fault of MS as some hardware manufacturers provide poor driver support. It's easy enough for them to rewrite drivers to work with Vista/Windows 7, as long as the hardware is still in reasonable use. Of course, if your hardware is 10 years old then it's going to be hard to find drivers for it.

That said, my parents have a scanner that is over 10 years old and works with Windows 7

Microsoft, as huge a company as they are, doesn't have the manpower to write drivers for every major piece of hardware created and sold. They incorporate plenty of bare minimal drivers where they can, but it's up to the hardware manufacturer to develop current (or fully functional) drivers for their products.

And I've heard of several printer/scanner manufacturers that had hardware on the market, but discontinued it and released new stuff when Vista launched... and intentionally never released drivers for Vista for their older products for the sole purpose of forcing people to upgrade, even though people were buying it off shelves six months before Vista came along.

My own scanner included, it was a Umax one and the driver support was terrible. In the end I ended up going with a Canon Linoscan and it worked out of the box in Windows 7

Yeah, so you would be better just finding Vista drivers and using compat. mode. It's also funny, I got the MYST, Riven, and MYST III 10-year anniversary pack and Riven came out in 1996, so it was made for Windows 95. Well, here, 14 years later, I can run it in this RC OS without touching compatibility mode! I was really amazed, because on the beta I had to go through a bunch of tweaking to get it to work.



Haha, I just noticed this, everyone who posted here except for jickster is a special position- Admin, Mod, VIP, hah.

All my drivers installed without a hitch, however when i tried the MS flight simulator 2002, it wouldnt install, does anyone know of any patches or fixes for this?
But my drivers installed fine, but i do have an odd problem with my co-processor? it shows in device manager, a little caution arrow on its icon?