HP Drivers and Windows 7

[ThePhotoDude]

Currently running Windows XP, have been trialling Windows 7 on a non-production machine but ultimately will probably move to it soon.

Does anybody have any insight as to how the HP drivers will be?
Do people use Vista currently with no problems? 32bit? 64bit?

It will be a show stopper moving to Win7 if the HP drivers show odd colors or if other applications, Qimage?, won't work.

Any discussion on this welcome.

John

[Misirlou]

Currently running Windows XP, have been trialling Windows 7 on a non-production machine but ultimately will probably move to it soon.

Does anybody have any insight as to how the HP drivers will be?
Do people use Vista currently with no problems? 32bit? 64bit?

It will be a show stopper moving to Win7 if the HP drivers show odd colors or if other applications, Qimage?, won't work.

Any discussion on this welcome.

John

I have an old HP 7960. The driver that came with W7 64bit seems to work fine, but I can't get it to select ICM as the color preference. I may try to load the old Vista driver and see how that works. I suspect it won't be exactly right, since W7 has an updated color management engine.

[davewolfs]

I have an old HP 7960. The driver that came with W7 64bit seems to work fine, but I can't get it to select ICM as the color preference. I may try to load the old Vista driver and see how that works. I suspect it won't be exactly right, since W7 has an updated color management engine.

I'm using the final version of Windows 7 and everything works fine.  I believe the drivers are built into windows 7, but I installed the HP drivers in compatibility mode and they work without a hitch.  Same applies to QImage.

[John.Murray]

Win 7 is really more of an incremental change; if you check Help | About, you'll even see the major O/S version still at 6.  

Win 7 uses the Vista driver model which casued so much pain during Vista's debut.  So far I've had no issues with any of my devices, including HP Z3100, B9180, LJ 4600 printers, Microtek Artixscan 120tf (now discontinued - 32bit driver only), and onboard AHCI Raid drivers.  I'm well impressed with Win 7 and have been since the PDC builds nearly a year ago....  

[Misirlou]

I'm using the final version of Windows 7 and everything works fine.  I believe the drivers are built into windows 7, but I installed the HP drivers in compatibility mode and they work without a hitch.  Same applies to QImage.

I'll try installing the full HP driver from their web site tonight. I still can't see the ICM choice no matter what I try with the driver that came with W7 RC 64. I have W7 32 on a couple of laptops, and I didn't have a problem with the canned HP drivers.

Overall, I have almost no complaints with W7. This is the only h/w problem I have at the moment, and I'm sure it's fixable. I have had no problems with any of the Adobe apps, DxO, QImage, etc. I have some old pre-XP programs that don't run completely, which all ran ok under Vista 32 bit. But none of them are particularly important.

I'm using a little Acer netbook as my field machine right now, and it runs Adobe apps on W7 with no problem.

[Misirlou]

I've just installed W7 Ultimate on my strongest computer. As far as I can tell, there's no way to invoke the ICM color management option with the latest driver. You can set it to sRGB or Adobe 98, but that's it. I wanted to generate some profiles, so I had to run my profiling package with the old XP driver under XP using the W7 XP VM. It worked great, but it's annoying that I had to do that at all. The Snow Leopard driver does allow for printing with color management turned off (which essentially is what the ICM option did in the XP driver).

If anyone has a way to get to ICM in W7, post your method here please.