Sunday, March 18, 2007

Vista Compatibility

Recent events have me pretty ticked off.

I just bought a Logitech Orbit MP camera. A cool little camera with 640x480@30fps and Pan/Zoom/Tilt features as well. I bought it specifically because there is a logo on the box that shows: "Works with Vista". Two vista installs later (32 and 64) it doesn't work with Vista, nor do the latest drivers.

I also had to uninstall the latest version of the 8800 drivers because the nvidia display driver kept crashing after playing W.o.W. for 30 minutes. I'm now back to the Feb. 20th release. Which while it works has some problems. Several are incompatibilty with the Hold Em' game distributed with Vista Ulti and crashes after running DreamScene for more than a few minutes.

Why is it that Samsung has Vista drivers that work with my 4 year old laser printer? And why does a nice little icon show up with my T-Mobile dash? All of my joysticks including my Yoke and Pedals from CH Products work as well.

The things I've read over in the ATI camp indicate that they are pretty happy with their "Vista Experience". And I have to be honest my Laptop has an old school X300 in it, and it's been running Vista since October with not a single instability.

I'm baffled at how companies can release products that are advertised to work with Vista but don't. From what I've been reading, Logitech's track record with software support for their hardware is pretty bad. NVidia has major issues as well.

I would like to see some legal action related to the claims of "compatibilty" I feel that it is really going to be the only way to send a clear message to these companies that it is NOT ok to use us as beta testers.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Hi logan- built my quad system when you did put vista ultimate 32 bit workin ok but same prob w drivers. i got cheaper vid cards workin ok dual sli
my logitec cam is something 5000 'works with vista' and it has worked ok. my older brother mfc multifunction printer 9700 however is limited in fax functionality with no specific drivers

also lament i have 4gb ram but not using in vista 32 reads only as 2.3 gb

when i run the benchmarks it is all 5.9 but 5.6 on my graphics card- however i am only out 150$ on graphics versus 500 for the 8800 with bad drivers