A Vista driver case study

One reason for the slow rate of adoption of Vista is hardware manufacturers dragging their feet with updated drivers. Finding information about scheduled release dates is tough, and even when you can find it, there's no guarantee it's accurate. Today’s case study: Fujitsu.

A year and a half ago, I bought a Fujitsu ScanSnap scanner. It’s a fast, easy-to-use sheet-fed scanner that quickly turns a stack of documents into PDF files. As a bonus, it includes a full copy of Acrobat Standard, which normally costs $250–300. The scanner itself was only about $360, so I feel like I got a pretty good value.

Unfortunately, the scanner software doesn’t work with Windows Vista. A few months ago, a Fujitsu support rep told me that their Vista driver package was being delayed until April, a fact I confirmed later on Fujitsu’s well-hidden Vista Support page (direct link to PDF page). Today, I checked that page again and – oops! – the release date has been changed to June 2007. The other bad news is that Fujitsu plans to support the now-discontinued ScanSnap series in Vista 32–bit versions only (other Fujitsu scanners are still on track for April release of Twain and ISIS drivers for 32– and 64–bit Vista versions).

The good news is that the existing ScanSnap software works on both Windows XP and Windows Server 2003, so I have other options available. And Fujitsu isn’t doing what some hardware makers are doing and simply abandoning this product line for Vista.