As you??™ve probably discovered on your own, there are a number of hardware
and software products that just won??™t work with Vista (particularly if
you??™re using the 64-bit version). Some of these products are simply awaiting
driver updates from their respective manufacturers, while others have been
abandoned because their manufacturers don??™t want to invest the resources
into supporting retired products.
If you haven??™t yet upgraded to Windows Vista, the easiest way to predict
what will work and what won??™t is to use the Windows Vista Upgrade Advisor
(UA), available at http://www.microsoft.com/vista. Although UA is
unlikely to give you any false positives??”wherein it tells you something
works with Vista when in fact it won??™t??”it will construct a laundry list of
potential problems with which you can follow up on your own. (Unfortunately,
UA won??™t run on 64-bit XP.)
For instance, UA might bring to your attention that your printer, antivirus
software, backup software, CD burning software, and perhaps your Bluetooth
adapter are all unsupported on Vista. So, this means you??™ll definitely
need new versions of your antivirus and backup software (see Chapter 6)
and your CD burning software (Chapter 4). You??™ll also need to check with
the manufacturers of your printer and Bluetooth adapter to see whether
they??™ve released native Vista drivers; if not, and you don??™t want to wait,
you??™ll need to replace those devices.
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