Take Care In A Newly-XP World!

A cautionary tale, to save you from some XP-related surprises:

I began my XP upgrade project by running Microsoft's XP Upgrade Advisor, which dutifully identified several pieces of hardware that wouldn't work without new, XP-compatible drivers. So I made the rounds of the various vendors' Web sites, expecting XP drivers to be prominently displayed.

To my surprise, several relatively recent pieces of hardware, including a wireless 802.11 network PCMCIA card and a very nice scanner, both from prominent companies, did not have XP drivers available. And to make matters worse, the companies would not commit that they will necessarily provide XP drivers for these devices at all! I do recognize that certain hardware designs might conceivably preclude a device from working with XP, but I have to wonder if it's more a matter of a vendor simply choosing not to put the effort into providing upgraded drivers across their product line, even for devices only one to two years old... If I purchased a device during the past couple of years, and the manufacturer leaves me high and XP-dry, I'm unlikely to give them any future business.

In this same vein, if you're moving to XP, or if you even think you MAY upgrade at some time in the future (and you probably will, if not for XP's increased stability, then because Microsoft will be phasing out support for older versions of Windows, as described in the Nov. 15 LangaList, you'll want to be very careful about what hardware you buy from now on.

Which, I've found out, is not necessarily easy to do. I was in a local office supply superstore yesterday looking at new scanners, and I was surprised that none of the descriptive cards indicated if the scanners on display were supported by XP. When I asked a salesperson, he had to crawl all over the boxes up on shelves to see if XP was mentioned on the packaging -- and in most cases it was not. Although I would be tempted to assume (there's that dangerous word) that contemporary products will work under XP, that's clearly not necessarily the case. If it doesn't say "XP" on the box, I won't buy until I verify its XP status, by explicit model number, with the manufacturer. (And if I were a retailer who didn't want to annoy customers and generate a lot of returns, I'd explicitly indicate XP status in the showroom and on the Web site.)

Similarly, since I'm suddenly in the market for a replacement wireless network card, I actually paid attention to an online add that offered a card for $79 (I guess ads do work, under the right circumstances). Unfortunately, nowhere in the information provided, nor throughout the order process, did it indicate which operating systems it would work with! Nor, when I went to the manufacturer's Web site, was there an explicit notice of which of their products worked with XP. (Only after I spent time on the phone with their pre-sales support folks, did I find out why this card was being sold so inexpensively -- it does not, and will not, support XP.)

So the moral of this story is that even though XP is "out," the many things you might want to buy to work with it --won't, necessarily. Don't "assume" they will, but check explicitly.

My initial subjective experience with XP is very positive, even though it would not succeed with an in-place upgrade and I had to wipe the disk and begin anew. And if, as it seems likely to do, XP does resolve the frustrating instabilities of W98, it will have been well worth the hassles and the unexpected replacement of some peripherals. But like Santa, as I go about my upgrade process, I will be "making a list and checking it twice" so that I remember which companies support their recent products in a newly-XP world, and which ones do not. And I'll be buying accordingly in the future...

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