IBM/Lenovo are providing drivers for old and decrepit kit, Sony? Got a new laptop this year? Upgrade path to Windows 7? Buy a new laptop!

Was listening to Buzz Out Loud 1090 and it seems that Sony are seeing a Vista like opportunity with Windows 7 and their previous generation(s) of kit. Whilst they aren't saying that machines sold before the launch of Windows 7 won't work with Windows 7, they aren't providing any driver support and are saying the way to upgrade you Sony notebook to Windows 7 is to buy a new one!

[LIFTED] cheek! Like they don't charge enough money in the first place.

I have a Windows 7 Professional (Upgrade) ready for my Toshiba Satellite Pro. I want to do a reformat, since the thing runs quite slowly these days, but there are not going to be any drivers for the bluetooth, wireless connection etc. for several months.

Windows 7 Upgrade Advisor shows that there are 2 drivers that will not work, and another 10 that probably won't, if I upgrade now.

I doubt they will be the OEM to do this. PC world are already marketing PC's with W7 pre-installed. Little do people realise it is VIsta in a party frock and will run on their existing PC. However, if by some fluke the Vista driver doesn't work on 7, I'm sure they'll use it as an excuse to EOL that component.

It is a bit more than a party frock, when you look at all the work that has gone on under the hood...

My Toshiba Tecra had a free upgrade to W7. It was posted this week, so I am hoping it will be waiting for me when I get to work tomorrow.

My 2 year old FJS Scaleo P was 100% compativle - loaded network and video drivers during the install (along with every other driver). The only thing not recognised was the Pinnacle DVB-T stick.

In fairness, calling it a party frock may have been a bit flattering.

I agree with this and I'm glad people are starting to realise Clicky

Apparently a lot of people are finding the RC slowing down quite considerably over the course of a few weeks too. Actually google "Windows 7 Slowing down" and it will give you 60,400,000 results.

That article makes some reasonable points.... but fails to notice some fairly big errors...

Just because no drivers are on a website does not mean it wont work, my Tecra M1 had drivers for EVERYTHING in Win7 RC which it identified and installed fine with exception of the SD card reader, using the excuse that a driver is not on a website isn't valid

A lot of the machines were tested with 64bit drivers, I have 3 machines of varying ages and components running 64 bit with no issues, the 2 Asus motherboards may become compatible in the future with a driver update.... but my Blood Iron and P965 Gigabyte board work fine in 64 bit windows 7, better than Vista with the mandatory WHQL certified drivers in SP1

Blue screens.. I have been running it in a working environment daily since the 6800 beta (probably before then since I had an internal build) and using machines 10+ hours a day I have not seen one BSOD

64-bit Win7 Pro picked up all the drivers for my Mac Pro, with the exception of the sound driver (Intel High Definition Audio) which was on the disk I got with the Mac anyway.

I still don't like the interface, but after working with it for a fair while I'd probably get used to it.

Yes, it is an evolution of Windows Vista, but it is like Snow Leopard on OS X or the last couple of releases of Ubuntu, they have worked on performance.

I do agree that it doesn't bring much over Vista. If you are a happy Vista user, there isn't that much reason to upgrade. If you are a XP user, it is a great step forward.

For all the bad press Vista became at launch, it has developed into a worthy replacement for XP and Windows 7 takes it to the next logical step.


60M results? From the total of 18 million people who tried it?

As to the article, new hardware? No, I'm using it on a 2 year old (then) mid-range desktop and the experience is fine, as was the Vista experience on the same machine. It feels a bit snappier, but the Dockesque task bar is a big step forward for me.