Printer drivers disappear on Vista Upgrade

  • Thread starter Thread starter Lance Douglas
  • Start date Start date
L

Lance Douglas

We are having an issue with printer drivers disappearing when
upgrading to Vista from WinXP. I know that kernal-mode drivers are not
supported on Vista, but it doesn't seem to matter whether it is a
kernal-mode driver or not or maybe we just don't know how to determine
whether it is a kernal mode driver, but we can reinstall the drivers
after the upgrade is complete so I don't believe they are. We are
seeing this behavior on multiple machines. We even installed some
basic HP drivers (HP4, HP8000, etc.) on WinXP and then upgraded to
Vista (Ultimate) and they are all gone. Vista does install a Fax
driver and a Windows XPS Document driver but anything that was
previously on the WinXP machine is gone once we upgrade to Vista. Is
anyone else having this problem? Any ideas?

Thanks
 
Even an upgrade is a clean install - of sorts. The drivers, I have found, do
not necessarily make the transition. You have to be certain that you have
Vista compatible drivers on-hand before you either upgrade or perform an
actual clean install. This is in case the necessary drivers are not part of
the Vista install package.

--


Regards,

Richard Urban
Microsoft MVP Windows Shell/User
(For email, remove the obvious from my address)

Quote from George Ankner:
If you knew as much as you think you know,
You would realize that you don't know what you thought you knew!
 
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