Minimize Your Vista-Related Hardware Hassles

Ease your move to the new OS with these tips; a fan to help your PC beat the summer heat.

When windows XP launched, some PCs and peripherals wouldn't work
with the new OS because device drivers had not yet been written. The
same is true for Vista.
Whether you plan to install Vista on your current PC, or to buy a
Vista-equipped system to use with your existing peripherals, these tips
will help smooth the transition.

Study up beforehand:
To run the bare-bones Vista Home Basic, Microsoft recommends a CPU
running at 1 GHz or faster, plus 512MB of RAM and 15GB of hard-drive
space. Home Premium, Business, and Ultimate editions with the new Aero
environment require at least 1GB of RAM, and for systems without
integrated graphics, a DirectX 9-capable graphics processor with 128MB
of its own RAM, DirectX 9, and a few other features. Read Microsoft's Vista System Requirements.

Microsoft's Vista Upgrade Advisor
scans your PC to determine which editions of Vista will run on it, and
which of its hardware components are incompatible with Vista. When I
ran Upgrade Advisor on my year-old machine, the program found no
compatibility problems--but it did list ten components for which it had
no data, including the PC's USB port. You can also check Microsoft's Hardware Compatibility List, or the Vista hardware list on IeXwiki. Need to identify what components are in your system? The free Belarc Advisor utility will quickly scan your PC and identify all its hardware.

If
Vista doesn't support one of your PC's components, look for updated
Vista drivers on the vendor's Web site. If you can't find them, the
drivers may still be in development--so ask the company about it. RadarSync, a device driver update service, has created a list of links to Vista drivers.

After
you have identified which drivers lack Vista equivalents, copy the XP
versions to a CD or anyplace you can easily access them once you've
installed Vista. Make sure you have your network drivers handy so you
can go online and download other device drivers and updates.

Be prepared for trouble:
Back up your old XP installation to a second hard drive or to a
different partition on your main drive so you can revert to XP if
something goes wrong with Vista. (What can go wrong? One possibility: A
PC World editor found that, after installing Vista on his home
PC, he could no longer log in to the office network because no Vista
version of the Cisco VPN client existed.) As an alternative to doing a
complete backup on a separate hard drive, use a drive-image program
such as the $40 Acronis True Image 10 to burn an image of your XP installation onto recordable DVDs.

Or set up your PC to dual-boot. Find instructions
on installing both XP and Vista on a dual-boot PC.

Once you've installed Vista, open Device Manager to check for problems: Right-click the Computer icon and choose Manage, Device Manager.
Nonfunctioning devices are flagged with an exclamation point in a
yellow triangle (click on thumbnail image at left to see an example).
If Windows can't find a driver, it may list the device as 'Unknown
Device' under 'Other devices'. HunterSoft's free Unknown Device Identifier utility helps you find the name of the mystery hardware.

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