What Do You Do About Driver Software When You Update Your Operating System?
Posted by benny in FreeWare on December 7th, 2009 | 6 responses
For printers, scanners etc. If the drivers are for ME they are not acceptable for XP for example. Going to the site of the scanner is no good as often the scanner is out of date and no new drivers are avalable. It seems wastefull to buy new equipment each time the operating system is updated when the old scanners etc work fine. Can the old drivers be converted to the new OS?
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6 Responses to “What Do You Do About Driver Software When You Update Your Operating System?”
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Every answer so far is saying much the same thing – go check manufactrer website for driver updates. If you’re lucky there might be XP drivers for you.
However – speaking from experience with older scanners – I’ve found there really isn’t much you can do about it when using XP. XP itself actively refuses to acknowledge what it deems as “legacy” hardware, or hardware used on previous versions of windows. If it’s not on the HCL (hardware compatability list) then its not getting in.
I had a colorado 9600 scanner which worked perfectly in any version of windows up to 2000. As soon as I updated to XP it just wouldn’t detect the device.
So – your only options are to downgrade to Windows 2000 or get another scanner mate.
Hope that answers it for you
Drivers cannot be converted, except by the original authors and they do this by issuing a new one compatible with a new O/S.
There are a number of websites where you can download drivers for free. The one I find to be best is Driverguide.com, but Sourceforge isn’t bad either
If you still have the discs that came with the peripherals then they usually have drivers for different OS’s on them. Window’s Updates also has loads.
You may have to live with it and upgrade the scanner as well as your operating system Device drivers are written for specific versions of the hardware’s firmware and for the host OS The driver is a combination of code that both the device and the OS can understand.
If the code the driver links to changes on either the device or the host OS the driver code needs to be revised.XP is substantially different from ME – which is now very old – and apparently neither the manufacturer or Microsoft thought it worthwhile to upgrade the driver.You could in theory do it yourself but you would need acces to the driver and OS source code as well as a lot of expertise.
The only workaround I can think of is to to configure your PC to dual boot ME and XP using ME when you need the scanner Good luck
search the net for newer drivers usually manufacturers release drivers for new operating systems later on
Old drivers cannot be converted as they are software programs and need to be recompiled.
but often they will work on newer systems.
Often there is a chance that someone in the open source community has had the same issue as yourself and may have written a driver. In that case look at sourceforge.