Brien Posey's Windows Blog: August, 2009 archives
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Brien Posey's Windows Blog:

August, 2009

Aug 13 2009   3:52AM GMT

Windows 7 Device Drivers



Posted by: Brien Posey
Windows 7, device drivers

I ran into something interesting this morning that I wanted to tell you about. As you are no doubt aware, Windows 7 is built on the Vista kernel. In fact, some critics have referred to Windows 7 as Windows Vista 2.0.

Being that Windows 7 and Vista are so closely related, I had assumed that I would be able to use Windows Vista device drivers. Apparently that isn’t always the case though. This morning I had to replace the sound card in one of my computers. When the new sound card didn’t work, I decided to look for Windows 7 specific drivers. Sure enough, once I downloaded the Windows 7 drivers, the card began working.

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Aug 11 2009   4:32PM GMT

Windows 7 Installation



Posted by: Brien Posey
Windows 7

Last week Microsoft released Windows 7 to some of their customers. Over the weekend I decided to try installing Windows 7 on a couple of machines. One of the machines was an older desktop that had already been upgraded from XP to Vista. Rather than doing a clean install, I wanted to see if Vista could be used as a way of indirectly upgrading from WIndows XP to Windows 7. I am happy to say that the process worked flawlessly.

For my other deployment, I wanted to see how well Windows 7 would do with a Vista upgrade on a newer machine that had never had XP installed. The machine that I ran the test on was a brand new Toshiba laptop. During the installation process I received a warning message indicating that my wireless network adapter wouldn’t work after the upgrade. I wanted to see what would happen, so I went ahead with the upgrade. Surprisingly, the wireless NIC continued to function after the upgrade with no adverse side effects.

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