Vista Yields Almost Double the Drivers of XP!

As a take-off on the old 1980's gum commercial, it looks like Windows Vista will "Double your drivers, double your fun".

When I read Langa Blog: Vista to Ship with Nearly 20,000 Device Drivers, I had to check the RCP Mag myself. Sure enough, the article indicates that Vista will ship with 19,500 device drivers.

According to Jim Allchin, however, this may not be all bad. Hopefully, when installing Vista, users will find that the drivers needed to run their software are already on board. Here's what was reported:

"The number of device drivers is really a small way of looking at it, since each driver can usually support numerous actual different device models. Indeed, sometimes a single driver can support hundreds of different models, as often is the case with video drivers," Allchin's posting said. "But, what is even more significant is that at the RTM [release to manufacturing] for Windows Vista, we already had an additional 11,700 device drivers on Windows Update compared to just 2,000 for Windows XP when it RTM'd in 2001."

Having read reports of Vista installations, it appears that this really has been paying off. I think its just the shock of the large number that sounds so unrealistic.