Last week’s column about downloading a Vista driver for a non-compatible printer resulted in a lot of emails this past week.  The emails all regarded having software that, like Debbie’s printer, will not run on Vista either.

There is good and bad news with this situation.  Some software applications will run just fine on Vista; just like they did on Windows XP.  The bad news…well, many programs that would run on XP will not run at all on Vista.

As I have mentioned here before, I installed Vista on a notebook computer to test out Windows Vista.  The new operating system seemed to work just fine.  Of course, there were some things that I didn’t like about it.  I have found that usually if I stick with something long enough I will grow to like it just as much as the previous version.  However, I couldn’t spend much time to try and grow to love Vista.  The reason I couldn’t spend much time around it was that many of the programs that I used would not work with Vista.

I don’t remember details on each and every program that didn’t cooperate, but I do remember one of them.  At that time I was our church bookkeeper and we used the next to the last version of Quickbooks Premium.

I installed Quickbooks on my Vista notebook computer and got an error about one individual file not working properly.  That didn’t bother me too much because – well, I’m just experienced with this type of occasional flare up.  I couldn’t fix it so I contacted Intuit (the owners of QB).

I knew I would have to contact them anyway as I had a one license version and was trying to re-install it again (even though it was the same computer with a different operating system). 

As soon as I mentioned the name of the file that didn’t work, the tech-support person said, “Oh, are you installing QB on a Vista computer?”  I told them yes and they said that the version that we just bought slightly over a year before was not Vista compatible.

I figured that they could tell me where to download a fix and I could be on my way.  I was wrong, wrong by a little over $300.  I was told that I would have to purchase the latest version of the program that was totally Vista compatible…for the full price.

So I fixed it on my own.  I reinstalled Windows XP and then put QB back on and all is well.  Also, this is the main reason that I won’t be using Vista on a regular basis in the near future.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, December 11th, 2007 at 7:08 am and is filed under Columns. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.