Why adhering to established standards is always a Good Thing

The memory in my work laptop failed the other day, rendering my Windows XP setup completely unbootable. It even killed the hard drive in the process. How? I don't know. But if you buy Dell, make sure you add the extended warranty.

As impractical as a complete crash and burn is, it was also an excellent opportunity to do an upgrade of the operating system. I opted to go for broke, and asked for Vista 64-bit.

Compatiblity wise this is a doubly complicated upgrade. Firstly the changed Vista security model, and secondly a 64-bit kernel.

Xerox has not released neither a Vista nor a 64-bit driver for my printer. Impediment? Not so.

My printer talks PostScript, an industry standard for computers and printers to exchange print ready data.

Any decent operating system is fully able to produce postscript data, and provides the necessary software and drivers out of the box. All that is needed is the PPD file describing the capabilities of the printer in question, like duplex printing, input trays, paper sizes and print quality.

So, as long as Xerox is willing to sell supplies and the printer doesn't burn, I'll always be able to upgrade. Driver or no driver.

As for Vista in general? Visual improvement, and many things work better than on XP. And being 64 bit I finally get to use the last 512MB of the memory...