How many tons of garbage has Microsoft added to landfills by making Vista not backwards compatible? -

Think of all those perfectly fine printers, modems, etc. that are rendered useless and dicarded into landfills because, here we are in the 21st century, yet Microsoft doesn t seem to be able to make a backwards compatible operating system.

There were many security issues with the way that drivers worked in XP and earlier MS Operating systems. MS took the view that they should make a more secure system. This means that the hardware would need drivers that work in the new way. In general, these drivers are written by the hardware manufacturers, who can choose if they write drivers for older hardware or not. My suggestion is to always stick with hardware that runs on generic drivers, as these are more likely to be rewritten for new operation systems. For printers, stick with PCL or Postscript. For modems, stick with ones that have Hayes compatable drivers. With reference to the above question - Epson 9 pin and 24pin, HP PCL4 and Postscript drivers have been in Windows since 95, although the drivers themselves have been re-written several times.

Your question is based on so many false premises I don t know where to start. Most of those peripherals are being thrown away because they ve outlived their usefulness, but even assuming that the issue is drivers, how is it Microsoft s fault if the peripheral manufacturers don t make new drivers? In fact, it s amazing that XP has allowed hardware to run with the same drivers for about 7 years. I can t think of any other OS that has been able to use the same drivers for that long. Can you? Can you name any other OS that can use a previous version s drivers?

How many foolish producers of hardware products didn t utilize the YEAR in which Microsoft was putting out free beta and RC versions of their OS, in order to create drivers that would work for them? PS, here s HP s solution for their Laserjets: the universal driver. http://h20325.www2.hp.com/blogs/laserjet…

why should they? if they did that, the peripherals industry would go bust in no time.