Like in most cases, it all boils down to support costs and the hardware vendors don’t want to start supporting issues that may be operating system related, rather than related to their drivers.

Still, the major hardware vendors are supplying beta drivers for vista as you will see in this page, but you don’t always have to have the vista compliant drive. Many Windows CP drivers will work great on Windows Vista, if installed correctly.

This might be a good time to tell you that many architectural changes have been done to Windows Vista, including the User Account Control. The UAC essentially makes every user (Even an administrator) run as a standard user and prompts whenever the user tries to perform an administrative task. This is an amazing feature as it will keep all of the viruses out (If you’d get a prompt for your credentials and you didn’t click anything, it’s most likely a virus and you shouldn’t allow it). I’m actually telling you all of this because many things in the Windows Vista Operating system run as standard user even if you are an admin, and you have to specifically right click it and choose “run as admin”.

So when installing drivers, if you do not have the Windows Vista version of the driver, you will need to first right click the driver installer, choose properties and then the compatibility tab. Then select the Windows XP SP2 compatibility mode and the checkbox that say “run as an administrator”. You’d be surprised how many drivers will install correctly after doing this.

Another GREAT tool for driver installation in Windows Vista is Windows Update. Windows Update provides you with the latest developed drivers that the hardware vendors supplied to Microsoft.

You may download drivers from the following vendors:

Display: Nvidia, ATI,

Sound: Nvidia, Creative

Network: Nvidia