I need advice on how to get vista to put a driver on for my ethernet card- please help

[robin]

installed vista beta 2 on a clean formated HD. Everything installed fine
but my ethernet card is on the mother board and for some reason it sees the
new hardware but will not install a driver for it so I cannot even go to the
web to find an update.

What I do not understand is after trying 4 different ethernet cards with
floppys that had drivers on them, vista would not see this either. (drivers
are for win98-2000)

I totally gave up, reformatted the HD and put on xp pro and xp pro found
drivers for the original card on the mother board. Why can't vista find
them.?

Someone told me to try doing an upgrade from xp pro instead of a reformat-
before i go and do this do you think this will work? or you have another
suggestion for me to get vista to install a driver for the card?

robin

 

[Mark D. VandenBerg]

While XP was an evolutionary redo of Win2000, Vista is a completely new
operating system. As such, many things, including drivers, are handled
differently. Simply put, just because it works in XP, doesn't mean it works
in Vista.

I suggest contacting the vendors of your NIC's to see if they have
Vista-compatible drivers for their products, or, if they don't, search this
newsgroup to see which NIC's have been able to work and then get one of
them. Most are relatively inexpensive.

 

[MICHAEL]

I thought Vista was an "evolutionary redo" of
Windows Server 2003 SP1.

The Vista code was originally based on XP and
that changed in late 2004.

Windows Server 2003 has a different
code base than XP.

Longhorn Server and Vista share
the same code base.

http://www.winsupersite.com/faq/vista.asp
Future Windows versions will always be based on the most up-to-date Windows version at the
time, and today that version is Windows Server 2003 with Service Pack 1 (SP1). When Windows
Vista development started two years ago, however, it was originally based on Windows XP. In
mid-2004, Microsoft had to restart the core development of Windows Vista because it was too
hard to go back and componentized the Windows Vista core code. So when it restarted Windows
Vista development, Microsoft naturally used the Windows Server 2003 with SP1 code base instead
of that of XP.

http://news.com.com/2100-1016_3-6075912.html
"The plan is unlike (Windows) XP and (Windows Server) 2003, where we had separate code bases.
We'll have one code base," Muglia said. "That will all converge next fall, roughly...when
Longhorn Server ships."

As the Vista team patches bugs in the desktop operating system, those changes will be folded
into the Server code. Meanwhile, the changes to the Server code will be added back into Vista
in a service pack for the desktop operating system, currently slated for delivery next fall.

The plan is not that new. Microsoft once hoped that Windows XP--then known as Whistler--and its
server counterpart would share a common code base. Instead, the company took longer to do the
server update, in part to revamp its security approach, and eventually shipped it as Windows
Server 2003.


-Michael

 

[Mark D. VandenBerg]

<begrudgingly>

Yes, Michael, you are correct in that Vista is a descendant of Server 2003.
However, in the context of answering Robin's questions about compatibility
between XP and Vista for the average consumer, I didn't think it was
necessary to point this part out. As my ex-wife used to relish, I could be
wrong!

 

[MICHAEL]

I reckon, your point is correct- Vista did not evolve from
WinXP, therefore, compatibility between the two with drivers
and such could be a problem. Which many of us have seen.
Sometimes drivers from XP work in Vista, many times they don't.
Or, XP drivers may not work as well in Vista.

-Michael

 

[Mark D. VandenBerg]

.... and yet I fail to feel any vindication...