Pages

Search

Thursday, October 29, 2009

My First Windows 7 Issue

So I made the leap (happily) from Vista over the weekend to Windows 7 and so far have been very satisfied in the performance increase I have gotten on my laptop. I have an Acer Aspire 8930, and it's a nice laptop. Everything ran okay on Vista, but I did not like a lot of the little annoyances.

So far, I have installed Windows 7 about 4 times on this laptop. I have tried the Beta, RC1, Home Premium and Ultimate RTM's and have been very pleased with the ease of installation and how fast it went. But here are a few issues I ran into, all related to hardware:

1.) Intel WiFi 5100 AGN - If you have this wireless card, the Windows 7 upgrade may fail. This is a driver issue and can be resolved quickly by removing the Intel Wireless app and driver from your computer prior to upgrading to Windows 7. Believe it or not, this wireless card has a driver that works out of the box with Windows 7, not extra work needed besides setting up your wireless settings. No big problem, but it was kind of annoying.

2.) Nvidia and Realtek HD Audio Drivers - For whatever reason, there are two Microsoft HD Audio drivers loaded when the upgrade/fresh install completes. I found that after loading the Nvidia drivers (Geforce 9m) that include the video and audio chipset drivers, that the sound starts to pop and crack on the Acer Aspire 8930. I fixed this by installing the latest Realtek HD Audio drivers and wa-la, popping and cracking went the way of the do-do.


I will continue to post anything else I encounter or about tips I have for working with the new OS.