If you’re a Windows XP diehard, you’re probably not making any quick moves to update your operating system to Windows 7. Windows 7 hits the market on October 22, 2009. You may or may not realize that Windows XP hit the market on October 25, 2001. Eight years ago. Eight years is a long time to run an operating system. A lot of things change in eight years. If you decide to celebrate Windows XP’s birthday by retiring it, you’ll be in for some changes yourself.

You Can Still Use XP Drivers Virtually

First, there is no direct upgrade path from Windows XP to Windows 7. You’ll need to do a complete install, which means that you’ll need to back up all of your files and re-add them to your drive once your upgrade is done. You may also need to find and install new drivers for your hardware. That may not be the most pleasant task, but it doesn’t have to be difficult, either. You can manage all of your drivers with a third-party driver manager like Driver Detective. Driver Detective will locate all of the appropriate drivers, download them and install them. You don’t need to do anything. It will even take care of the drivers that are installed, and replace them if they get corrupted or go missing.

If you have Windows XP software that you don’t want to (or can’t) upgrade, you can still run it using Windows 7’s virtual XP environment. (As I said, some things have changed.) You can also still use the XP drivers in the virtual XP environment. Under the new license for Windows 7, you can purchase downgrade rights to Windows XP for a short period of time (about six months), after which, you won’t be able to purchase computers that come with XP loaded. You’ll also have to pay for the privilege of downgrading. Only certain premium editions of Windows 7 come with downgrade rights.

Sooner or later, (and sooner, if Microsoft has anything to say about it), Microsoft is going to drop support altogether for Windows XP. Once you start using Windows 7, you may find that it changes the way you think about XP. Windows 7 is more stable than Windows Vista and Microsoft has addressed some of the issues Vista users were most critical about. In short, Windows 7 is what Windows Vista should have (and could have) been. To borrow a phrase from a very old TV commercial: “Try it! You’ll like it!”
Photo Credit: Randen Pederson

If you’ve been around computers for a long time, the prospect of an easy OS upgrade (or even an OS update) can seem grim. It’s a story heard ’round-the-world, so to speak, and it goes something like this: new OS doesn’t like old drivers. Another variation on the story is that an old piece of hardware that’s critical to the operation (or still in perfect working order or required for a legacy function) isn’t made anymore and there’s no driver support for the device beyond what the manufacturer abandoned, etc.

Missing Hardware Drivers Can Ruin Your Day
The lack of drivers could certainly ruin your day. Microsoft has received more than an earful of complaints regarding driver availability and driver quality and tried to build in an automated driver update process. The thinking was that whenever the OS updated, Windows would go out and find the right drivers and send them along to your OS.

Good thought. Bad execution. Many Windows users found that Windows was downloading the incorrect drivers, replacing drivers that didn’t need replacement, missing drivers that should have been passed along in the critical updates, and other driver mishaps. They also found out – often too late – that they didn’t know how to configure their computers correctly for the automatic updates to take place, and that the auto updates often slowed the computer down to a crawl at critical times, like shutdown. If that weren’t enough, many hardware vendors never released updated drivers after an OS update, leaving plenty of users sitting in the dust.

The result: users who were still unhappy about the driver situation in Windows on top of the same never-fully-addressed driver situation in Windows. Now, to be sure, the automatic updates work sometimes. Most computer users don’t want a computer that works sometimes, though. I know I don’t. Although computer techs don’t like to admit it, most computer users just want to sit down at their computers and work. They don’t want to worry about driver updates, or OS updates. They don’t even want to worry about their anti-virus updates!

For those users, one of the best solutions – at least in the foreseeable future – is a product like Driver Detective. It’s a top-selling driver manager that automatically finds, loads and checks the status of each driver each time the computer starts. Driver Detective will find missing and broken drivers, apply driver updates and generally keep things flowing smoothly. It’s ideal for the millions of users who just want their computers to work.

Photo Credit: Angie Lauw, via Flickr

For diehard Windows XP fans (or just for those who have software designed for Windows XP), Windows 7 will include a virtual environment and Windows XP drivers that will enable you to run your old XP software on Windows 7. And yes, I did use the term old.

Why Vista Never Caught On

Windows XP is the darling of diehard Windows users for more than one reason. First, users are incredibly comfortable with Windows XP and much of the software used at the enterprise level is still available for Windows XP.

Second, Vista didn’t provide a compelling reason to upgrade. Without user demand, software publishers didn’t write updated versions of their applications for Windows. Those that did often left out critical drivers. That, by itself, made Vista hard to love.

Third, the update cycle for the Windows OS didn’t mesh very well with users’ personal upgrade cycles. The hardware requirements for running Vista were not inconsequential for some users, and as a result, millions of potential users decided to opt out of the Windows Vista upgrade.

Now comes Windows 7 and Microsoft is trying its best to eliminate the excuses users come up with to avoid upgrading to Windows Vista. For those users who are an entire revision behind, the switch to Windows 7 will be an eye-opener. The virtualization environment means that software designed for Windows XP is still usable on Windows 7 provided that you’ve set up a virtual XP environment.

Don’t expect Windows XP to hang around forever. As Microsoft commits further to the Vista/Windows 7 platform, it becomes less likely that the company will back off of the product’s current development path. It also becomes increasingly less likely that the company will continue to make efforts to help users bridge the gap between Windows XP and Windows 7.

For right now, users can still purchase downgrade rights to Windows XP, but that window is scheduled to close about six months after the latest version of the OS is released in October. Once the downgrade window disappears, users (except those in Microsoft’s volume licensing program) will be left to choose between Windows Vista and Windows 7. For me, I’ll go with Windows 7.

Photo Credit: Josh Bancroft, via Flickr

Users often complain to me when their computer takes a long time to start up. To some extent, diagnosing a slow startup is easy in comparison to diagnosing a slow shutdown. Users may not notice that their computer is having difficulty shutting down, or they may not know. Users often hit the Shut Down option and walk away from the computer. So what’s the harm in a slow shutdown? Often, a slow shutdown is symptomatic of a driver problem in Windows.

Diagnosing A Hung Driver At Shutdown

Windows (especially Vista) takes care of a lot of housekeeping at shutdown. Updates are typically installed before lights-out, so this can mask some shutdown problems. If your shutdown problems are persistent, or the computer seems to hesitate for a long time each time you shut down, you’re free to suspect a driver that’s gone bad.

To troubleshoot, you can take a quick inventory of your loaded drivers using msconfig. Scan the list of drivers. If you spot one or more that you know you don’t need, disable them or better yet, uninstall them. You’ll need to restart and shutdown to see if one of your orphan drivers is causing the problem. If you’re lucky, this should be the end of the Long Goodbye. Most often, you won’t be this lucky, but unloading unnecessary drivers is never a bad idea, so this exercise won’t be a total loss.

Once you’ve pruned out the drivers you will never need, examine the list of remaining drivers. Disable them, then restart and shut down the computer again. If your computer’s separation anxiety clears up, you know you’re dealing with a driver problem. Add drivers back into your configuration one at a time, restarting and shutting down until you find the driver that’s causing the problem.

If you do find the problematic driver, check with the manufacturer to see if there’s an update for it. If not, the driver has probably been corrupted and should be replaced with a fresh copy. As long as you’re updating things, make sure you have applied the latest security and OS updates.

If this isn’t really how you planned to spend a quiet evening at home, consider getting a software program that will monitor and manage your drivers. Driver Detective is the top driver management software. The program will detect corrupted, old and missing drivers and will download and install them for you. It’s a lot easier that “startup, configure, shutdown, repeat.” (Unless you like that sort of thing…)

Photo Credit: Kaushik Gopal, via Flickr