Random Rants & Raves

I’ve been using Win7 since the M3 build on my machine. I recently put the Win7 RC on my machine and everything went absolutely fine. Today I decided to repave my wife’s 5 year old notebook and install the 32-bit version of the RC on it.

After backing up everything she wanted on the D drive, I quickly formatted the C drive (which had Vista on it) and installed the RC instead of upgrading. Problem was that I hadn’t noted down any hardware specs of the machine (a Dell 510m) and after the first boot the machine came up with quite a few drivers missing – especially the wireless network and the graphics card. So I was running at a resolution of 640x480 without Wi-Fi.

The Wi-Fi took about 10 minutes to get running. I downloaded the Vista 32-bit drivers for the Intel PRO 2100 Wi-Fi from here. Did an update driver and our home network was recognized immediately and I added Neeta’s notebook to our HomeGroup.

The display card, based on the Intel 855GM chipset, was a different matter. Although I found a number of places having a “modified” driver for Vista, none of them seemed to work. Updating the driver would, after a reboot, still revert back to the Standard VGA Adapter and show the 855GM driver as having a problem.

It’s then that I came across this blog post and this thread linked off from it. Following these instructions allowed to the notebook to start using the new drivers and I was able to max up the screen res to the highest setting immediately. Only issue is that the Aero effects are not available on this.

i guess Intel really needs to get a Win7 driver out for older cards as well since this machine is good enough for all work other than playing games. I wish it was possible to get the Aero effects as well – but overall Win7 seems quite snappy on this older hardware as well.