[RESOLVED] W7HE - Complete Reinstall

In finally upgraded some HD's in my rig and decided to format and do a clean install with W7 only (vs. my previous dual-boot).

W7 Home Pro installed fine and seems to have installed most drivers automatically, with a few drivers coming via Windows update.

When I now use my Driver CD's (soundcard, vidcard etc) I mostly get errors and failed installs.
How should I go about getting the "best" drivers installed and running, to assure I get the best functionality from the hardware (vs the M$ generic drivers) ?

The only other place to get drivers is from the Manufacturer of the hardware;)

Windows 7 Home Pro? I think you mean Home Premium (versus Home Basic).

I you are using that EPoX board, motherboard drivers may be hard to find for Windows 7.

You should have checked for driver support BEFORE you installed 7.

Nvidia doesn't even have a Legacy driver set for NF4, so stick with what you have.

Even the AMD/ATI X1xxx series are not officially supported under Win7. You can try the Vista drivers but read the warning first.
http://support.amd.com/us/gpudownloa...3&lang=English

Quote:

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Note: AMD’s DirectX 9 ATI Radeon graphics accelerators are not officially supported under Windows 7. If the user chooses to, they can install the ATI Catalyst Windows Vista graphics driver under Windows 7. Please be aware that none of the new Windows 7 graphics driver (WDDM 1.1) features are supported (as the Windows Vista level graphics driver is limited to WDDM 1.0 level support). Using the ATI Catalyst Windows Vista driver under Windows 7 is not officially supported by AMD, and as such AMD will not provide any form of customer support for users running in this configuration

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You didn't tell us 32 or 64 bit either. Kinda important.

W7 Home Premium 32 bit
I had this installed as a dual boot with W2K about a year ago. Back then the manuf. Driver CD's worked. Ran fine all the time.
Now as a standalone install I am wondering why some driver CD's fail - same hardware.

It could be because of Service Pack 1 I suppose.

Vista drivers nearly always work perfectly in Win7 if you can find the official drivers for something.

I did some more playing around last night, not using the std install features but drilling into the folders/files of the original install CD's. Coupled with checking the manuf. sites I was able to get all key components up and running (just like b4 under the dual boot setup). Despite some W$ warnings about non-compatibility everything works.

I think I should have installed drivers first and then updated to SP1.

Anyway, W7 seems to handle "old" hardware much better than it advertises.

So far so good :-)