Windows Vista Drivers

Vista Compatible Drivers

Once you have tested your hardware, the Upgrade Advisor later on move to check out the software drivers that are important for the system as well as the peripherals attached to the system. May be the system you are testing, already have passed the basic compatibility test, the driver test are beat complicated and challenging. In that cases the three possible situations that the advisor will report about drivers are as follows:

• After installing Vista, you may need to manually update certain drivers.
• Some devices Vista may not support at all.
• Vista may simply support your devices with native Windows Vista drivers, then nothing to do to make drivers work properly with Vista.

Vista In-compatible Drivers

If you are unable to find the updated driver that specifically says it is Vista-compatible, the very next step is, take help from tech-support. Major manufacturers have quick releases of drivers those work with new Windows versions. But on the other hand the smaller companies, those don't have longer support for a particular model of hardware, never develop a Vista-ready driver by giving more attention. Then the last option left is you have to go for the newer hardware that does have a driver useful in Vista editions.

The Vista Upgrade Advisor gives you the list of the drivers, that aren't known to be available, but you will get something that will work. That is nothing but a XP driver. A driver that works fine with XP may work fine with Vista, but the Upgrade Advisor do not give any information as such.

To install an XP driver, you will need to :

• Download it from a manufacturer's site or have a copy of the driver on a CD, a USB drive, or some other medium.
• Use Vista's Add Hardware control panel to try to write the new driver to hard disk.
• Copy the old driver to a safe location, such as a USB drive, in case the new driver works worse than the old one did and you need to switch back.

Vista Drivers - Which Need Manual Updating

Updated versions of drivers that are compatible with Vista only need manual updating. Microsoft has not included them in the shipping version of Vista because of some reasons. Vista can not install the newer drivers. So you are the one who have to find and install yourself, before trying to install Vista over XP.