So, my first experiences with Win7 beta were really good. Someone at Microsoft even replied to my blog about that, which is sort of geekily gratifying at some level. But today I tried installing it on an older PC with my brother, on his HP 715n (1.8ghz P4 with 1.25gb of ram and a Radeon All-In-Wonder 64mb video card), and had less success.
It seemed to install and run mostly ok, but I could not get the onboard ethernet to work. I searched the web for drivers to no avail. I even tried putting an old PCI ethernet card in, but couldn’t seem to find drivers that would work for that, either. I wound up trying a Belkin USB wireless adapter, and was able to get online with that, but you’d think a fairly standard on-board ethernet adapter would be in the driver pool.
I was also unable to get the sound card (can’t remember the brand on that, but it was a 5-channel surround card) to work. Everything on the PC worked great in XP. I wound up trying Vista on it, and had no troubles at all, besides the fact that Aero won’t work with only 64mb of video memory. Shame.
