Windows Vista: The Missing Manual

Chapter 18. Hardware

A PC contains several pounds of wires, slots, cards, and chips—enough hardware to open a TrueValue store. Fortunately, you don't have to worry about making all of your PC's preinstalled components work together. In theory, at least, the PC maker did that part for you. (Unless you built the machine yourself, that is. In that case, best of luck.)

But adding new gear to your computer is another story. For the power user, hard drives, flash drives, cameras, printers, scanners, network cards, video cards, keyboards, monitors, game controllers, palmtop cradles, and other accessories all make life worth living. When you introduce a new piece of equipment to the PC, you must hook it up and install its driver, the software that lets a new gadget talk to the rest of the PC.

UP TO SPEED : The Master Compatibility List

Remember that Windows Vista is much different from Windows XP. Discovering that a piece of your existing equipment is now flaky or nonfunctional is par for the course.

If you'd like to eliminate every glitch and every shred of troubleshooting inconvenience, limit your add-on gear to products that pass the test—the one administered by the Vista Upgrade Advisor. That's a little program you can download from this Web site:

www.microsoft.com/windowsvista/getready/upgradeadvisor

It runs fine in Vista. However, it's really designed to run in Windows XP, on the premise that you'll want to know how many of your peripherals won't work before you install Vista. (The Upgrade ...