The situation with many printer drivers is that XP drivers work if you use
Virtual Ports. The Vista print team lied to a group of us who went to them
and asked them to change the default to help facilitate printers working.

It's always great to hear when one peson says "all my drivers work all my
peripherals work well; my hardware works great in Vista." We all want that.
But stay tuned, because I predict about March that MSFT is going to be
overwhelmed with problems with Vista way beyond the number that there have
been in XP at the same time period in its circulation/adoption to the
general public.

If you go to http://support.microsoft.com and do a search on Windows Vista
there are over 200 MSKBs. It's positive that they are finally getting
around to doing some more--for 15 months that number was low--but if you
read ***many of them they are just plain bugs they shipped with, they
refused to fix when reported to them, and they could have their own subset
called "tin ear." They say "we know the bug is there and we don't have a
fix." I haven't counted how many there are like this, but I will soon. I
can add at least 100 bugs to that list. What they don't say is that "we
knew it was there in the fall of 2005 and we elected not to try to fix it or
we couldn't fix it."

The fact that MSFT who is supporting Vista by phone now (they can't tell if
you were part of the so called CPP which was really an ad campaign or not
anyway):

Phone Number: 866-425-0593 "English only" support The version of English
that their India Convergys PSS speaks is unintelligible. They aren't going
to understand you either, if you speak English.

I think it's fascinating that they say it's "English only" because what is
spoken (not by Indians at large) but by the Indians who man the PSS phone
lines as Convergys of Ohio the company who contracts to do MSFT Support for
the public (MSFT doesn't do support for the public via phone--don't be
fooled) can't speak intelligible English nor do they know anything that has
clinical efficacy on the ground towards fixing Windows or Office nor have
they for over ten years.

I could find tons of things we fix routinely hear that those bozos can't
fix. MSFT should have kicked Convergys of Ohio to the curb long ago, but
they're dirt cheap and it's outta sight outta mind for MSFT with public
support. It's interesting that Dell alleges they paid $100 million to
improve support, because Dell uses the same crappy Indian support that is
just as bad most of the time with hardware support as MSFT is with their
oursourced contract for public support. MSFT outsources it to Convergys and
conergys outsources it to India for the highest percentage of their call
volume.

One of several subjects you'll never see a MSFTie come in this group or
anywhere else and discuss is the eggrigious quality of their support. They
don't want to know about it.

If anyone has a printer not working, you might try right clicking the
printer in the printers folder (get to it by going though the Control Panel
or Device Manager)>Ports tab>and selecting USB Virtual port.

Brother is telling people that they have given drivers to MSFT and they have
given some drivers--My Printer worked in every build of Vista until RTM, but
that the drivers may be less functionality than their finally released Vista
driver which doesn't make a lot of sense, although they might mean they'll
update it for Vista.

David Pogue is a very good author--he probably leans towards Apple products,
but he writes O'Reilly missing manuals for XP and soon for Vista and you
should catch his columns at www.nytimes.com/circuits or in the print edition
of the NYT.

I should have included an aritcle on Vista from Wall Street Journal's Walter
Mossberg. It can be read here under the Nove 2 category:

http://ptech.wsj.com/archive.html

CH

"Mike" <no@where.man> wrote in message
news:20CA80BA-20AC-4199-811B-FC8160A8EA1C@microsoft.com...
> BChad Harris" <msftneedstogetoutvistainfo.net> wrote in message
> news:uWNw1HmJHHA.2232@TK2MSFTNGP02.phx.gbl...
>> That's not to say, however, that Vista is worth standing in line for on
>> Jan. 30. Moving to Vista means hunting for updated drivers for your
>> printer, audio card and so on, not to mention troubleshooting
>> incompatible programs.
>
> No, it *might* mean hunting for updated drivers, and *perhaps*
> troubleshooting *some* incompatible programs. Both of my HP printers
> work fine - a LaserJet 4+ and a DeskJet 970 inkjet. All of my other
> hardware works also - ATI X800 XT video, both network cards, etc.
>
> Otherwise a good review, but the above gives the impression that nothing
> works.
>
> Mike
>
>
>