I noticed my uploads were happening a bit faster so I decided to check in over at http://speedtest.net to see what my connection was clocking in at nowadays and was suprised to see that my upload speed was almost 10MB/s.

Download speed hasn’t changed much since last time but upload certainly has.

I’ve been running Windows 7 on several machines for almost two weeks now and things have gone much smoother than I would have expected considering it’s the first beta. The one thing I hadn’t dug into much yet was the fact that I still had two devices on my main desktop at home that didn’t get automatically detected. As a result, they sat in the “Other devices” node in Device Manager–driverless.

I headed to the HP support site and looked up my model: HP Pavilion Elite PC m9360f and ended up on this page. One of the devices I was looking to find drivers for seemed to be a Lite-On Wireless Network Adapter which I found in the list of drivers available for download. I went ahead and downloaded it and tried to run it but got a dialog that said:

Your system does not meet the minimum requirements for this update. Update has been cancelled. (9998)

I had a feeling this was more of an incompatibility with Win7 than really not meeting the minimum requirements. I ended up figuring out a way around it which basically consisted of the following steps (which seem to work for at least several of the drivers available):

1. Launch the update program’s executable file (e.g., sp37473.exe).
2. Eventually, you’ll see the message I mentioned above but don’t close that dialog.
3. Open up Windows Explorer
4. Type ‘%temp%’ in the address bar to switch over to your temporary files directory.
5. Sort the view by “Last Modified Date” and look for the folder that was most recently modified (for me the folder names seem to be consistently named “pft____.tmp” where the underscores are some random string).
6. Go into the folder, and then again into the folder with the actual driver files (usually named ’src’ or ’source’, etc.).
7. Copy the full path to that folder to your clipboard.
8. Head over to the Device Manager and right click on the device you’re trying to install drivers for.
9. Select “Update Driver Software…”
10. Click on the “Browse my computer for driver software” button.
11. Paste the path to the folder with the driver files into the text box/drop down list.
12. Make sure the “Include subfolders” checkbox is checked (some of these seemed to have several levels of nested folders).
13. Click on Next.

If you managed to find the right package to download that corresponds to the device you’re trying to fix, things should install easily at this point and the device should no longer be in the “Other devices” node. If you didn’t, you’ve got some more searching to do and it potentially might not just be on the HP site.

If you’re clueless as to what the device might be, what’s worked best for me is to the the “Hardware Ids” property from the device in need of some driver-love (it’s a string that looks like this: “PCI\VEN_1814&DEV_0781&SUBSYS_760011AD&REV_00″) and search the web for it. Chances are you’ll find some clues that will lead you to the right place.

In my case, here are the two device hardware IDs (Found in the Details tab in the device’s property pages) I had to find with links to the drivers I ended up using:

• PCI\VEN_1814&DEV_0781&SUBSYS_760011AD&REV_00: 
  • Lite-On Technology/Ralink Wireless driver download page
• PCI\VEN_8086&DEV_2930&SUBSYS_2A6F103C&REV_02:
  • Intel ICH9 Family SMBus Controller - 2930 driver

Once I installed these two drivers, my Device Manager was no longer showing any unidentified drivers so the job was done. Hope this helps someone else someday…

I decided to give Windows 7 Beta 1 a shot and have had nothing but success (with some driver hunting) so far and I’ve installed it successfully on three different laptops.

First, I installed on my MacBook Pro via BootCamp. I actually performed an “Upgrade” instead of a “Clean Install” on that one and it went smoothly requiring no steps following the install–everything just worked.

Next I tried my oldest machine, a Compaq laptop which Vista just wasn’t usable on. It also installed smoothly and all devices worked after a quick trip to Windows Update.

I then went on to install on our next laptop: a Toshiba Satellite M45-S355. The install went well once again but, even after a trip to Windows Update, I still didn’t have my WiFi adapter working. So I set off on several searches for wireless drivers and came up empty for about an hour. Just when I was about to give up, I found this site. It seems Toshiba doesn’t have Vista drivers listed at all for this machine on their U.S. site but I did find them on their Europe site. Posting this in case anyone else runs into the same problems hoping that this saves them the time and frustration I just experienced. Anyway, I ended up using the Intel PRO/Wireless 2200/2915 Vista 32 drivers (direct link) and everything’s all happy now.

Update: I also noticed I had a “Mass Storage” device without drivers. From the same site, I downloaded the Texas Instruments Flash Media Driver and it also installed successfully. All devices seem to be covered now.