CNet: “As for hardware drivers, there were 30,000 such drivers that shipped with Vista, more than three times the number that came with Windows XP.”
Of course, it really doesn’t matter how many drivers there are if the one or two that you really need aren’t available :-).
Take my Toshiba M400, for instance. Vista updated a couple Intel chipset drivers a couple weeks back, but ever since stability has been an issue. I’ve run into several blue screens since. (My brother has encountered similar problems with his Vista system too.) I imagine it’s because of one of the several other beta drivers that I have installed on the system. When there will be a complete set of solid drivers for the M400, I don’t know. For now, I don’t rely on the system as my primary system.
What’s holding me back is not just about stability, I’m missing a key Vista driver for my printer too. I can’t live without a printer–for printing out airline passes and the like. My printer in question is an HP 3550. The HP website indicates that a driver will be available sometime between now and July 2007. This means my primary system for work is likely going to be an XP system until then.
From the HP site, here’s a list of the HP printers that are supported in Vista. As you can see there are quite a few printers with Vista drivers available already. At a quick glance it looks like there are a little under 20% of HP’s printers that are yet to be supported in Vista and under 10% that never will be. Not too bad.