That is quite a statement, nevertheless I am seeing an increasing number of problems with hardware devices that will not run in Windows 7 despite having drivers available. There seems to be more and more difficulty in getting device drivers that are reliable under 7, or else getting Microsoft to look into these problems. The level of this is well in excess of our Windows XP experiences. For the first time since we switched to Windows 7, which first started to be used experimentally in our school two years ago and has been full-on for all of this year, I am starting to build a Windows XP image for a brand new laptop. This HP Elitebook 8460p has a compatibility setting for the hard disk in its BIOS which makes it run XP setup without trying to load a driver (which is nearly impossible without a built in floppy disk drive these days).
As alluded to in previous posts, I and others working in this field are starting to get a distinct impression that Windows 7 is not what it’s cracked up to be. The support from Microsoft for this platform is just not there the way it was with XP and previous versions of Windows. The new technologies in 7 are supposed to deal with the issues that make you need to reinstall Windows. This is really not the case in practice and I have spent more time in an average year with reinstalling 7 than I ever had to on XP. Added to that I have had to rebuild images completely from scratch when Microsoft locks you out of your own image with the anti-piracy technology and things like the sysprep limit that never caused any difficulties in XP. At home I am going to have a second computer running XP to deal with the phone’s drivers that 7 simply refuses to install or make work. XP is reliable and dependable and will run everything we need to. It will most likely keep us going until handhelds take over.