Executive Summary:
In a perfect world, the sun always shines and manufacturers always provide new software and drivers so that their devices work on the newest Windows OS. But alas the world is far from perfect. So, besides getting an umbrella, you might want to try two workarounds if your older devices aren't working on Windows Vista and the manufacturers of those devices haven't provided new software or drivers. |
At my company, we recently started
to roll out Windows Vista on some
of our machines. As we expected, a
lot of devices no longer work. Take,
for example, our laptops that use
USRobotics’ USR5420 USB wireless
device instead of a built-in Wi-Fi chip.
The driver doesn’t install on Vista
unless we copy the installation CDROM
to the C drive, then configure
the installer to run as Windows XP
SP2 using administrator privileges.
When we do this, the installer completes
and Vista is able to access
Wi-Fi networks.
Unfortunately, this trick didn’t
work with our HP Scanjet 7450c
digital flatbed scanner. This scanner
is connected to a Windows Server
2003 R2 server through a USB device,
and we use HP’s Precision Scan Pro
software to share this scanner over
the network. On XP, we install the scanner’s driver and an HP utility
called Scan to Network, which tells
the scanner driver to use the network
printer instead of a local one.
On Vista, we were able to run the
installer without changing the installation
program’s compatibility mode,
but when we started up the Precision
Scan Pro software, we received
numerous JavaScript errors, followed
by a message saying that the scanner
wasn’t available.
When we tried changing the compatibility
mode of the scanning software
to XP SP2 and running it under
administrator privileges, we didn’t
even receive JavaScript errors. We
only got the message that the scanner
wasn’t available. However, when I
changed the settings of the scanning
software back to the default settings
(i.e., run as Vista, no administrator
privileges), the scanner was available.
I have since tested this trick on
several other computers and in every
case the scanner worked. Somehow,
setting the scanning software to run
as Windows XP SP2 under administrator
privileges, then setting it back
to the default settings fixed all the
problems.
Maybe these two tricks will work
with other devices that don’t initially
work with Vista. Shame on HP and
other manufacturers for not providing
new software and drivers for
“legacy” hardware.