I,too, have wondered why everyone seems to have been caught so off-guard about Vista. I'm coming to the conclusion that maybe they have been trying, and it's been a struggle.

Item: It doesn't take much Googling to discover widespread problems with buggy video drivers -- especially across the nVidia line, but ATI isn't immune, either.

Item: Microsoft's own product groups are late to the Vista party. Visual Studio 2005, their flagship development platform, was not Vista-ready and they slipstreamed a special Vista update just a couple of weeks ago to address this after widespread developer complaints. Ditto SQL Server 2005. And key products still in widespread use like Visual Studio 2003 will never be supported.

The only way I can explain this train wreck is that companies are hitting unaccustomed brick walls in adapting products for Vista. A member of nVidia's driver development team, for instance, gave an interview the other day in which he claimed that they are struggling with a completely new driver architecture. He claims there are twenty million lines of code in their video driver suite now. If that's even one-tenth true, it's an amazing number, and I have my doubts that they will ever stabilize such an overly complex product.

Either Vista has become enough of a pig that it's collapsing under its own weight, or it's exposing the complacency of application and driver developers that, for security reasons, it can no longer tolerate. Either way this is shaping up to be the most painful Windows version upgrade to date.

This is precisely why I've not upgraded any Microsoft product over the last 10 years until SP2 comes out. I'm more then content to run a slightly older platform until the rest of the world is done beta testing MS's latest products. Maybe this makes me lazy, but it sure saves a lot of headaches considering some of the horror stories I've read.

I can't agree more about the perpetual parade of pointless printer drivers. What's especially irking is that it seems these days every printer not only needs a special driver, it has to come with some kind of "print center" application that installs yet another always-running bit of software on your computer.
I understand why it's happening - people are making things like printers cheaper by moving software tasks like raster image processing out of a printer's firmware and into your computer - but in the end, it seems like the end-user has to pay for it anyway, since now I need a faster machine with more RAM to carry that burden.

I remember playing this game. The new OS is constantly shifting. Designs change, functions change signatures, recommended procedures change ("open the widget, THEN allocate the whoozits, not the other way around as was originally recommended") and things that worked with the last iteration do not work with the new one.

When developing a new version for a new OS the challenge was delaying enough that the OS would be stable and would really release on the stated date versus not delaying enough to have something that worked when the new OS finally did hit the streets.

So, I suspect that the issue lies with new OS's being complex beasts, especially if one is trying to get out of the mire of past wrongs as well as create something new and wonderful. HW vendors have a real hard time making a winning play until the OS is stable. And we know how long that will likely take. Heck, I didn't move to XP for any real work until SP2 was out and well tested for some months. Until then, it was just a disk image I could wipe and relay.

Kudos for being gutsy and actually trying to get some work done on Vista.

Didn't I read somewhere that Microsoft was way late in releasing the necessary info (API's?) for writing Vista apps?

At the risk of belaboring the issue, I too am quite stymied by how unprepared companies like HP and Zone Labs were.

I contacted HP mid-January to inquire about support for my printer on Vista. The response I got was that MS had not yet published a release date for their product and they had no information to give at that point. Huh? Vista was in beta for a year and the "End of January" date had been published since October 2006. At this point I casually suggested that they take the time to go to Microsoft.com and read the Vista section - this is the point that I suspected things were not going to go my way. In the end, it took 2 months of weekly email correspondence with HP to find out that my 2 year-old printer is not supported on the Vista platform. Although my 8 year-old Epson worked flawlessly.

Regardless of who is to blame for this fiasco of ill-preparedness, as a consumer I expect the products I buy to work flawlessly. If the vendor I buy from doesn't live up to my expectations, I find another vendor who can (and never look back). At the rate technology changes, there is no such thing as brand loyalty anymore. You get what works best for your situation at the cheapest rate. There is very little to be said about name-brand recognition and the quality you get from those brands. Sony, Toshiba, HP... the components are all the same and are all made in Taiwan - so how are they different?

HP did the same thing with NT4 and their new-at-the-time OfficeJet all in ones. For $35 they sent me a driver CD that DIDN'T WORK because the parallel port driver they built wanted to talk to the hardware directly - an obvious no-no for NT, which had been out for 4 years at that point. So, they suggested using the HP DeskJet 500 driver (no color mode, sound familiar?). No fax, no scan, no color - but it would print. Thanks, HP, I'm sure your lack of programming talent really helped your bottom line.

HP's CURRENT wisdom includes a drop-dead timer for the color print cartridges in the Color LaserJet 1600. I personally assisted a client site of mine with the problem. This printer had been purchased for use in a mobile trailer, but was virtually unused after 8-10 months. One of the staff snagged it for use in his office, he does a lot of stuff in color. The cartridges were full, as shipped by HP in the box, with a total of 3 pages printed - the status page I printed showed as the 4th copy. HOWEVER, the printer refused to use the full, new cartridges, even after resetting the maintenance panel. The solution was to go buy $400 in new cartridges for a $300 printer. Almost criminal, in my opinion.

I've also fought with the "universal driver" joke they shipped, trying to bypass the Terminal Server printer naming issues - waste of time. Win2K3 SP1 made that a non-issue.

I bought my first HP 4 in 1993, I bought my last HP2600N in 2006. I will have to think long and hard about purchasing an HP printer ever again. Minolta makes a nice color laser......

> Either way this is shaping up to be the most painful Windows version upgrade to date.

Haven't we all grumbled the same thing each time that we've been forced to upgrade software, drivers, hardware, and our first-born just to tread water?

Hey, speaking of printers, lets not forget how many of our old lasers -- that are still working just fine at 4 or even 10 ppm -- are having to be scrapped because our new machines have no parallel ports. Boo...

> I will have to think long and hard about purchasing an HP printer ever again. Minolta makes a nice color laser......

Me..., I started buying HP printers in the 80s, but for laser have happily switched to both Brothers and Dell. My color laser -- Dell 3100cn wasn't too expensive and does quite well. (XP & Vista find my Dell 3100cn on my net and my various cheap and robust Brother lasers on machines around my network with no problem...)

Brian,

Looks like you've run into HP's "smart chips". The good news is that you can replace these cheaply. A quick search on eBay or Google shows them at $7-15 each. Here's some more info:

Bright Idea: Smart chip technology
http://h71036.www7.hp.com/hho/cache/331615-0-0-225-121.html

HP to expand 'smart chip' range
By Angus Kidman, ZDNet Australia (June 10, 2004)
http://www.zdnet.com.au/news/soa/HP_to_expand_smart_chip_range/0,139023165,139150193,00.htm

Class Action Challenges HP's Inkjet Replacement Warnings
http://www.consumeraffairs.com/news04/2005/hp_inkjet.html

Evaluation of HP Color Laser Jet 2600/2605/1600
http://www.scc-inc.com/Engine/engine1-7H4YT.aspx

I got a new color laser for home last week - a Samsung CLP-300 - list $299, into price $224.99 - it's only 10 inches high, bits in the same shelf space where my HP Photosmart Inkjet used to sit. And it came with a VISTA install CD right in the box! (not that I'm using it - both my home machines are still on Win2K!)

For what it is worth, I just checked HP's site and the Vista driver SW is available for download. The site listed the driver release date as being March 14.

Regarding Barton's information, there sure is. Turns out it's for USB installs only - not for printers accessed through a network.

The good news: I guess this means it won't be too long before the network version is published as well.

- Bob

Why scrap old printers when internal parallel port cards are dirt cheap and generally work well?
I had HP DeskJets for a while as I didn't trust Epson any longer. Their piezo heads have the life time of a fly and exchanging them costs more than the printer. HP's cartridges have the print head right on them, but for the casual user ink is insanely expensive and dries up before one can make full use of it. Next time I get some cheap color laser - or an expensive one when the toner is dirt cheap. Why don't they all build printers of a quality like the old Epson LQs. Mine is going towards 20 years and prints fine like it did on day one.

Here's a question... If HP (or whomever else) is so anti-new drivers for old printers, why not CHARGE for some print drivers? Personally, I'd be willing to fork over $20 for a fully-functioning Vista print driver for my obsolete printer that's working just fine. At least it would prevent me from jumping ship to another manufacturer who's more willing to support their older products with drivers...

Personally, I think Microsoft should take note here... I won't be upgrading to Vista until they put more pressure on printer, scanner, video, and network (especially laptop minipci wi-fi cards) manufacturers to give away or sell fully-featured drivers for equipment.

One other question--WHY DOES HP LIE about compatibility on their site? I still have a very old 1994-era HP Deskjet 550C for printing quick junk. They say the printer is incompatible with Vista. But I do know, back from when I was still trying to use that printer with older DOS apps, that it's compatible with early HP Laserjets & PaintJets??????

I agree with Markian Zadony, why does the 'new' HP consider it good business practice to lie to customers. I worked for many years as an engineer for HP when it was 'Bill & Dave's company', at that time lying to customers on this scale would have got you fired pronto. The new HP, and the HP I knew, share only the name; the ethical standards and the product quality are long gone.

We too have several HP Deskjet 500 series printers, (One of the most 'bullet-proof' printers we ever made.) all still going strong for routine office printing tasks! I checked on the HP web-site for compatibility between the 500 Series printers, Vista, and a new HP laptop PC that we were considering for addition to our battery of HP computers. That HP web-site stated that HP would be supporting the 500 series printers with drivers for Vista. (No, I didn't want Vista, but it came bundled with the laptop; We would have much preferred WIN2K Pro. which we use on all of our other machines.)
Well, guess what, on a barely truthful basis HP is correct, Vista detects the DJ500C and loads a driver automatically, so far so good. We were able to configure the DJ500C printer and driver as the system default printer and get a "Ready" statement on the 'Printers' screen in Control Panel.
BUT: We could not run a clean test-print, we got spurious error messages from the printer. ('Change Cartridge', we had a new cartridge present in the printer.) We could not run a print job. So the HP Support is mythical; yes, there is a driver in Vista, no, it does not operate as a useful driver

( By the by, the printer and the laptop were connected via a Belkin USB to Parallel adaptor. I too decry the abandoment of the parallel port, since so many printers used it. Yes I understand about the marketing ploy to trigger a new round of hardware replacement; I don't want to play.)
It gets worse; Microsoft refuses to discuss the issue, "It's an OEM version of Vista, call HP". HP refuses to discuss the issue, "the Deskjet 500 series is out of support life".

Stone tablets and chisels anyone?

Folks,

I also have become very disappointed with HP support or lack thereof... I just bought my first PC with Vista Home premium and can't send faxes using the HP Director application that was provided with my HP G85xi All in One unit purchased about 5 years ago. HP never did support faxing and scanning for any other MS applications as far as I know. I am currently involved in an endless email discussion with the HP support people? and they promise that there is a relase of full functionality coming soon.... I can hardly wait if you get my drift. /DaveB

I am really disapointed I got the computor with vista installed and later bought the printer a 2840 laser high price and unable to use it as the software only prints black and can not use other functions in the computor good on you HP.