Things that work with Win 7 which didn’t work under Vista

Though the beta of Windows 7 we have been telling people that if something could be made to work on Vista, expect it to work on 7. Obviously this is not a guarantee – some things break with service packs never mind version changes, but as an expectation its a good one; and as rule of thumb it works both ways.

A little while ago I needed to print something off at home and hooked up my old Epson. I keep meaning to sell it, and not getting round to it. Now this particular printer has a PCMCIA slot so you can plug memory cards into it – and you get an idea of the age from the fact is PCMCIA (with a supplied adapter to CF, and no SD in sight). This never worked on vista. So I was a bit surprised when the install dialog came up looking like this.

Houston we have storage support ! This seems odd to me , because surely people have alternative card readers which work at faster speeds than PCMCIA over USB 1.1 why bother putting it back ? (The only answer must be it annoyed enough people having a non working device showing up). I haven’t been back to see if support for the storage device got added to Vista.  Say… I wonder if the drivers for my HP scanner – which don’t support transparency mode – have also been updated/added to windows 7.