A few months ago I bought a new scanner – an HP G4010. At this time I was using Vista Ultimate (64-bit).
Windows 7 is still unreleased, so anyone installing it needs to be aware that it isn’t yet the full package – and that is especially true of drivers. There are few third party W7 drivers available at the moment – Hewlett Packard informed me that a W7 driver for the G4010 is on the way, but it isn’t available yet.
Now, so far I’ve not had a problem with many drivers or other software. Most of the Vista stuff installs and runs perfectly on W7 , with a few exceptions (but betas are often available). One piece of software I am very annoyed with is Raxco’s PerfectDisk 2008 . Unlike most software, this one is deliberately programmed only to install under Vista so even if it worked under W7 (which is quite possible, since W7 is based on Vista anyway), it is deliberately prevented from installing. In other words, you are forced to upgrade – and I consider that to be a rip-off, even if upgrading is only $19.99.
I was a little annoyed to find that HP’s installer for the G4010 also wouldn’t run at all. No error – it is just deliberately prevented from running on anything other than XP or Vista . I’ve since had a fiddle with W7 and it appears that the drivers wouldn’t work even if they would install, so I’ll have to wait until the full W7 release before HP releases specific drivers.
But this is where W7’s XP Mode comes into its own. The XP drivers install perfectly on the Virtual Machine and the scanner is up and running again. So for the time being, if I need to scan or do OCR, I can do it in Virtual XP and immediately switch to W7 to use the files produced.
Windows 7 is fast and extremely versatile.