Both Vista and Server 2008 have earned a reputation for high uptime once the device driver situation is (as they say in England) “well sorted.” In my experience, the few blue screens of death that I have seen, outside the Virtual PC/Virtual Server environment (which seems to increase BSOD frequency by at least an order of magnitude), have occurred on systems where one or more drivers are either (a) buggy or (2) not updated for the operating system. Microsoft used to have a single website to help people verify hardware compatibility before making a purchase or performing a migration from an older OS to a newer one. This was the “Hardware Compatibility List,” or HCL, at microsoft.com/hcl. That site has been replaced now by three sites: winqual.microsoft.com/hcl (the “Windows Logo’d Products List”), https://www.microsoft.com/windows/compatibility for Vista compatibility information beyond the logo program, and www.windowsservercatalog.com for Server 2008/2003 compatibility. These sites are very useful for determining software compatibility as well as hardware compatibility, by the way – as well as finding out which products include explicit 64-bit support. The absence of a particular program or device from any of these sites does not necessarily mean that the program or device won’t work. For example, the Vista compatibility information would lead you to believe that Photoshop 6.0 won’t work, and yet it does. Similarly, the Server compatibility site doesn’t indicate that you can run Server 2008 x64 on a Dell D830 laptop, but you can. So, in my view, the best way to use these sites is to find out whether Microsoft knows about the hardware or software and has certified it for use with a particular OS, and to find out if there might be reason for further research – for example, if a product isn’t listed, or if it appears with a caveat of some sort. Postscript: For identifying potential hardware issues in a Longhorn migration, you may also want to take a look at the Microsoft Assessment and Planning toolkit on Technet. It is the (free) successor to the Vista Hardware Assessment toolkit. Recent posts
Windows Server 2008: finally friendly for drivers
Analysis
Dec 28, 20082 mins
