Windows 7 and Drivers?

  • Thread starter Thread starter Davej
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Davej

I just installed Win 7 and was surprised that it activated my
motherboard's integrated sound and network. It also has the video
running at a decent resolution. This pc is 4 1/2 years old. Should I
attempt to install the drivers that I would have needed with XP?
Thanks.
 
Davej said:
I just installed Win 7 and was surprised that it activated my
motherboard's integrated sound and network.
Click to expand...

Normally that's done in the BIOS. Are you saying that it changed
BIOS settings? Just curious.
It also has the video running at a decent resolution. This pc is
4 1/2 years old. Should I attempt to install the drivers that I
would have needed with XP?
Click to expand...

If you have access to all of the settings you need, maybe not.

If you make a backup copy of Windows, you can try anything without
risk.

I would look for Windows 7 drivers.
--
 
I just installed Win 7 and was surprised that it activated my
motherboard's integrated sound and network. It also has the video
running at a decent resolution. This pc is 4 1/2 years old. Should I
attempt to install the drivers that I would have needed with XP?
Thanks.
Click to expand...

By doing so, you can verify differences if there are - apart from
support chipset downloads, perhaps easier to observe with sound and
video, and benchmarks for otherwise trade-offs or performance
characteristics at the MB level only.
 
Normally that's done in the BIOS. Are you saying that it changed
BIOS settings? Just curious.
Click to expand...

No, I'm saying that when I install XP it is unable to use sound or
access the network until I install the motherboard drivers. With Win7
it was able to load its own drivers and get the sound and the network
operational.
 
Davej said:
No, I'm saying that when I install XP it is unable to use sound
or access the network until I install the motherboard drivers.
With Win7 it was able to load its own drivers and get the sound
and the network operational.
Click to expand...

That is typical, a more recent operating system supports more
hardware. If everything is working correctly, you can leave it as
is. I would look for the most recent motherboard drivers,
especially if they explicitly support Windows 7.

Going with Microsoft is usually a bad idea. A good example of a
bad thing is Windows Update hardware updates. I would trust the
hardware maker before trusting Microsoft. In any case, if you have
a backup of Windows, you really can't go wrong.
 
I just installed Win 7 and was surprised that it activated my
motherboard's integrated sound and network. It also has the video
running at a decent resolution. This pc is 4 1/2 years old. Should I
attempt to install the drivers that I would have needed with XP?
Thanks.
Click to expand...

Microsoft learned a hard lesson with the Vista release and the
non-availability of drivers from component manufacturers. They spent a
bundle to include many more drivers in Windows 7.

These drivers may not be the most current or provide the best
performance for any one component but it assures that most existing PCs
will install W7 and run right out of the box.

If you can find a Windows 7 driver for a component from the
manufacturer's website then that will probably be a better driver for
you to use. That applies to the graphics card in particular. W7 comes
with a generic WDDM 1.1 driver that will run your card at near normal
resolutions, but it will not utilize the advanced features of the card
provided by the manufacturer's driver.
 
Davej said:
No, I'm saying that when I install XP it is unable to use sound or
access the network until I install the motherboard drivers. With Win7
it was able to load its own drivers and get the sound and the network
operational.
Click to expand...

Not unusual with Win7, which has much better treatment of drivers than
XP. Similar thing happened with my machine, which under XP needed RAID
drivers loaded from a floppy drive to use the BIOS RAID, but under Win7,
the RAID drivers were included.

Don't use your existing XP drivers unless Win7 can't get some device
working.
 
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