Devices / Drivers not working in Windows 7?
Solution 1:
I am running Windows 7 RC1 x64 on both my laptop as personal desktop and am pretty happy with it.
Personal Desktop: Dell XPS 420
- Intel Core 2 Quad Q6600
- 2GB Ram
- 2x250 GB HDD running in RAID 0
- MSI NX8800GT zilent graphics card.
- Some other peripheral hardware
No issues whatsoever.
Laptop: Dell XPS M1530
- Intel Core 2 Duo T7250
- 4GB Ram
- 1x160 GB HDD
- Nvidia Geforce 8400GS
- Intel 3945abg Wireless
No issues except the recent issue I had connecting to network shares in the office. Also, the Intel 3945abg wireless has problems correctly waking up from hibernation; often the only way to get it to work is to disable / enable it entirely. This problem also occurred using Vista, though.
Solution 2:
Running Windows 7 on four machines. All four are DELL, so I can only give feedback on their hardware. So far, no problems at all with hardware incompatibility with DELL XPS 360, Optiplex 755, GX620, or Latitude D630.
As normal, drivers are a different story. I had had problems with NVIDIA video drivers (crashes here and there), although the latest beta has being quite stable for a couple of weeks now.
Solution 3:
I just installed it on my HTPC and did not have any problems other than MKV playback locked the system up to the point of a hard boot.
I ran the Windows 7 Upgrade Advisor Beta first and it did not find any problems.
Solution 4:
I'm still running W7 Beta but will move to the RC soon. It's a really old machine, with an nForce 2 chipset, which as all nForce 2 owners know, was tossed to the curb in Vista; there are no Vista drivers for nForce 2 chipsets, meaning it's a "driver orphan".
Here's a dirty little secret for you:
I've got it working using old drivers for Windows XP and 2000.
This is hardly an optimal solution, and is of course fraught with peril. However, I have not had a single crash in the entire time, and with the exception of some display artifacting (the video card is AGP FX5200, also a driver orphan) has worked like a champ.
Microsoft would really, really like it if you upgrade your hardware to something that has "newer" drivers. However, the old drivers work just as well, and if those drivers were stable to begin with, you can get by with them in a pinch.
Solution 5:
I installed Windows 7 RC x86 on an old Dell Optiplex GX270 -- 2.6 GHz Pentium 4, 512MB RAM, 40GD Hard Drive with an older Intel chipset.
Windows 7 does install and run acceptably on this older machine with only 512MB of RAM.
I did have some issues getting the video card drivers installed. It has an older Intel 865G which is not supported in Vista. After the OS install, the video card came up as 'Standard VGA'. I did get the older XP drivers from the Intel site and then ran the install under XP SP3 compatibility (the install program was checking windows versions...) Since this driver works through XPDM and not WDDM, Glass is disabled. However, rendering is much faster with the old Intel driver than with the Standard VGA driver.