More (problems) on Windows 7

by mike ~ February 1, 2009

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.