What to expect from Windows 7

Part 2

Hardware and drivers

You want a happy Windows experience? Get good drivers for all your hardware. That was one of the painful lessons of Windows Vista’s disastrous first year, and Microsoft and its partners aren’t likely to repeat those mistakes with Windows 7.

In more than a dozen installations of the Windows 7 RC code on a variety of desktop and portable PCs, I’ve seen only a handful of devices that required me to install a driver manually. In several cases, a driver that wasn’t installed during the initial setup was picked up by Windows Update shortly after I logged on for the first time.

For most mainstream hardware, even for some fairly old devices, I suspect that driver coverage for Windows 7 today is already better than it was when Windows Vista Service Pack 1 was released. Windows 7, after all, has a head start, because most of those Vista drivers will work with it as well thanks to their shared driver model. Hardware companies appear to have learned their lesson from the Vista debacle and are putting some serious effort into getting good driver support well before the final release.

The makers of graphics boards have been especially aggressive with video drivers. Nvidia and ATI have been delivering updates that support the WDDM 1.1 driver model, which reportedly consumes fewer resources than Vista’s WDDM 1.0 spec. I’ve found up-to-date Windows 7 drivers for fingerprint readers, some advanced sound cards, and a motley assortment of TV tuners, suggesting that the current driver lineup is stronger across all device classes.

The biggest driver headache I’ve found has occurred on a couple of occasions when Windows 7 installed a generic driver for a notebook component that needed a custom driver to unlock its full potential. That occurred on a Lenovo ThinkPad, whose built-in microphone wouldn’t work until I replaced a generic audio driver with a Vista driver downloaded from Lenovo’s website.

I’ve had no problems with 64-bit support, finding drivers for every device on two desktops and one notebook. But if you have a system with a multi-touch screen, like the HP TouchSmart TX2 or Dell’s Latitude XT or XT2, you’ll have to wait a little longer to try out the fancy new gestures (your old touchscreen drivers will enable basic touch and tablet capabilities). N-Trig, which makes the touch screens and supplies the drivers, hasn’t updated its Windows 7 driver package since January 22. I don’t recommend using those beta drivers with the RC.

In the gallery: The new Devices and Printers window, Automatic driver updates, and a touch keyboard.

Source : http://blogs.zdnet.com