If you’re having a hard time getting your Lenovo laptop to use Aero under Windows 7, it’s probably because you don’t have the right driver. If you’re having trouble finding the right driver, it’s probably because you’re looking in the right place.

Going to Lenovo.com and searching through the list of updates available for a T61 in the Windows 7 category currently shows zero updates for graphics. However, if you instead look under Windows Vista, you’ll be much more successful. In my case, that’s where I found the Nvidia driver package needed to get my laptop to use Aero under Win7. Here’s a direct link to the update that saved me specifically.

Once you’ve installed the drivers, you’ll have to enable Aero. To do so, I just picked one of the Aero themes and it immediately switched over to Aero.

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)

Continue reading →

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. Continue reading →

Picked up a new computer today–another HP system as the last couple have really worked out for us and it’s just a whole lot easier than building my own (i.e., figuring out what to buy). Continue reading →

This is very cool. If you shoot with a Nikon and use Vista this is a must install. It allows RAW files to be treated like JPEGs inside Vista’s Photo Gallery.

The Photo Gallery is one of the reasons I’ve come to really like Vista and one of the things I really miss when I find myself on one of my remaining XP boxes (still have hardware that doesn’t have Vista drivers available yet–fingers crossed). It’s many, many times better than dealing with photos with regular Windows Explorer.

Update: Fixed the link to the Nikon site.

Update (3/11/07): They’ve released an updated version of the Nikon driver that addresses all of the problems/bugs in the original release. You can get the update here.