Microsoft claims Vista now supports 1.9 million devices

In responding to constant user complaints that a number of peripheral devices won’t work with Windows Vista, Microsoft has disclosed that its newest operating system now supports 1.9 million devices, up by 300,000 since Vista was launched.

In a keynote speech by Mike Nash, Corporate Vice President of Windows Product Management at Microsoft’s Windows Hardware Engineering Conference (WinHEC), said that Vista compatibility problems with some 4,000 devices were responsible for roughly 80% of user complaints.

However, he declined to identify which devices or vendors are most lacking in Vista support.

“It’s a relatively small number of drivers that are driving most of the complaints. The key thing is that we have 95% coverage. It’s good and getting better,” Nash said.

When a consumer installs any new operating system, the software generally polls the attached devices, and attempts to match them to its list of drivers. For Windows 2000, only 350 devices were installed in the box; for Windows XP, 10,000 drivers shipped with the operating system. With Vista, 20,000 drivers came bundled with the operating system. Windows Update, the stopgap method if a driver isn’t found, included 2,000 additional drivers at Windows XP’s launch, and 13,000 drivers at the launch of Vista, Nash said.

Nash also mentioned that more than 9,000 devices have been submitted to Microsoft’s “Certified for Windows Vista” logo program, which requires products to be tested for compatibility with Vista.

Roger Kay, an analyst at Endpoint Technologies Associates, said the driver problems being experienced by Vista users are about the same as they were for early adopters of Windows XP — except that now, “early adopters have a much louder megaphone in the blogosphere to air negative perceptions.”

The number of drivers ready at Vista’s launch was much higher than with previous releases of Windows, Nash said. That was in spite of the fact that Vista added new security and administration features, such as Microsoft’s User Account Control technology, that broke the compatibility of many existing device drivers.

Nonetheless, as part of his keynote, Nash issued a call to hardware manufacturers to continue supplying device drivers for its latest operating system Windows Vista. He promised that Redmond isn’t punishing laggards. “We’re not getting mad,” he said. “We’re sharing data with them to help them do a better job.”

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