If you’re considering an upgrade to Windows 7, one of your major concerns will likely be driver compatibility. This is especially true if you’re upgrading from Windows XP or if you’ve deployed a new computer and plan to use existing peripheral devices. In a controlled IT environment (such as what you have at home), you may experience few or no problems, largely because you have a small network and only a few devices.

Windows 7 Home Experiences Don’t Always Translate

Home users may not understand what the big deal is when IT professionals talk about migrating to Windows 7. After all, how hard can it be, right? You’ve been on Windows 7 since it came out and everything works fine. Sadly, in the corporate IT environment, there are a striking number of variables that come into play during OS migration. Migrations are always well thought out and never rushed. (Or at least that’s the way it should be…)

Two of the major issues with corporate IT environments are the shared nature of certain peripheral devices (like printers) and the special work needs of some staff members. One staff member may be using Windows XP while another may be using Vista. One staff member may be using a 32-bit OS while another is using a 64-bit version. Most staff members print to one printer, while a few members need to print to a different device. In a corporate environment, the possibilities are nearly endless, so the migration process is often slow and frustrating. What works for one user simply WILL NOT work for another.

Finding the right drivers for each variation is critical. Ideally, the vendor of each peripheral device would have developed an appropriate Windows 7 driver but that often turns out not to be the case. So what happens when the manufacturer has not provided a Windows 7 driver for a specific critical device? Sometimes, good old-fashioned detective work and a little bit of luck can mean the difference between business-as-usual and throwing out a perfectly good widget.

Your relative “luckiness” increases if you’re migrating from Vista to Windows 7, and tends to decrease a bit if you’re moving from Windows XP to Windows 7. Your fortune is of course tempered by whether or not the manufacturer made a Vista driver. If so, your Vista driver might work just fine under Windows 7, but there are no guarantees!

In my next post, I’ll go through the processes of finding the right drivers, finding acceptable drivers and migrating to the new operating system.

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Microsoft’s fourth quarter revenue reports show that the record company’s record revenues were due largely to Office 2010, Windows 7 and Windows Server sales. A growing number of Windows 7 drivers have made both consumer and corporate adoption more palatable.

Windows 7 Surpasses Windows Vista

In addition, a new survey by Netmarketshare shows that Windows 7 installations now surpass Windows Vista installations by a narrow margin. The number of Windows Vista installations has dropped consistently since October 2009, just after Windows 7 hit the market. Windows Vista market share has dropped from a high of 18.83% in October 2009 to its current level, estimated at 14.34%. While some Windows 7 installations represent upgrades from Vista, the majority of Windows 7 adoptions appear to be new.

Windows XP market share has dropped from 65.89% to 61.87% in the same timeframe, indicating that a small percentage of XP users have adopted Windows 7. The decline in Windows XP use has been gradual but steady since Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 were introduced last September.

Assisting growth in the adoption rate of Windows 7 is the fact that third-party hardware manufacturers have committed to making more Windows 7 drivers than Vista drivers when that operating system was released. Finding compatible drivers for Windows 7 is arguably easier because those manufacturers that did make Windows Vista drivers for their devices had less work to do to provide Windows 7 drivers. In some cases, no driver modifications were required, meaning that hardware vendors got “two for the price of one” in terms of driver development.

Microsoft has worked hard with third-party manufacturers to help them ensure that their hardware drivers are Windows 7 ready. Nonetheless, many hardware manufacturers have yet to produce Windows 7 drivers for their older hardware devices. Without compatible drivers, these devices are either crippled or useless, a situation that Microsoft had hoped to avoid.

For Windows users, the issue of driver management has always been difficult. Microsoft has attempted to automate the process of finding and downloading drivers in its later OS releases, but many users still do not understand how to configure the updater to download driver revisions. Further, Windows sometimes selects the incorrect driver for the user’s PC.

Despite the improvements in driver detection, driver management software is still the order of the day for many PC users. Users rely on software like Driver Detective to help them keep their PC drivers up-to-date and available, if a corruption of some type should occur.

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Godex International has announced that TEKLYNX has developed and released a set of drivers for the company’s barcode printers. The new Windows 7 drivers enable users of Godex printers to use LabelView, LabelMatrix and Codesoft software with the Godex barcode printer lineup.

New Drivers Are A Good Sign Of Windows 7 Adoption

As with regular printers, it’s generally a good sign when a manufacturer releases new drivers to extend the function of a device to a new operating system. Barcode printers are specialized pieces of equipment, and the availability of Windows 7 drivers is not likely to make a major splash among users who don’t have a barcode printer.

The availability of new Windows 7 drivers for a niche product, however, is a strong positive indication that more users (especially commercial users) are lining up to add Windows 7 to their list of supported operating systems. Unlike Windows Vista, which was a commercial dud, Windows users across the board are moving toward Windows 7 adoption.

With the advent of the new fiscal year, we should begin to see the many organizations that time their upgrades to budget cycles start moving toward Windows 7. The fact that Windows 7 doesn’t make major hardware demands on PCs, plus the added benefit of the Windows XP emulation mode, should make migration an easy decision.

Despite Microsoft’s best efforts, however, the question of driver availability, especially for older hardware and niche products is still open. If manufacturers and software publishers create a broad range of drivers for older and uncommon hardware, and if Microsoft can deliver on its promise of stability – so far it has – Windows 7 is likely to experience the wide adoption that Windows XP did.

For the remainder of 2010, users should expect to see additional driver rollouts for older hardware and niche hardware. Until the Great Driver Migration is complete, however, some users will be engaged in a “chicken and egg” conundrum: “I’ll upgrade if the drivers are available” will do battle with “We’ll write drivers only if we see a lot of people upgrading to Windows 7.”

Once Windows 7 has been on the shelf for a year, it’s unlikely that a large number of new drivers will enter the market. Instead, manufacturers will carry Windows 7 support forward in their product line, but won’t likely look backward, even for some of their more popular legacy products.

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Time moves forward, whether you want to acknowledge it or not. When you’re talking about computer hardware, though, time seems to speed right along. For many users, the computer seems to age a lot faster than the peripheral hardware does, and nowhere is this truer than when you’re talking about printers. This will become apparent the moment you try to locate a Windows hardware driver for a ten-year-old device.

Who Wants To Give Up A Printer?

Printers come in all shapes and sizes, and for right now, I’ll sidestep the question of inkjet versus laser. For most commercial purposes, laser printers rule the day because they’re longer-lasting and cost less over time than inkjet printers do. The longer lifespan of a laser printer does pose some problems, though. I can assure you that there are 10, 15- and even a few 20-year old laser printers that are happily churning out page after page, even if at an agonizingly slow rate.

That brings up one of the real challenges that owners of older peripheral hardware face when upgrading their operating system or their computer hardware: connectors. Older printers and peripheral devices expect to connect using a serial port or a parallel port. There are also a number of obsolete connector types you may have to deal with, like Centronics or PS/2 connectors. Newer hardware doesn’t always (often?) come with older connectors, including the die-hard standards like serial and parallel ports or VGA connectors.

Today’s computers come with USB ports and one or more new video connectors. With no place to connect a serial or parallel printer cable, you might be tempted to toss the old device, even if it still works. Usually, if you’re willing to do a little digging, you can find an adapter that will convert your old style printer connector to something that your new computer can recognize.

That leaves the problem of finding drivers for your older hardware. Yes, it’s possible to find drivers for old hardware. In some cases, existing drivers might work just fine, or a standard driver has been adapted for use with a newer computer and older equipment. The main obstacle becomes finding the correct driver.

In cases like this, I recommend that users download and configure a driver management software package like Driver Detective. Driver Detective has a library of millions of drivers that it can draw on to help you find the correct driver for your current hardware setup. Having the correct driver for your older hardware can mean the difference between having to replace an obsolete (yet still quite functional) piece of equipment and being able to get additional use out of it.

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