the windows 7 on a M4400 thread..

will dell start shipping new units with 7 preinstalled on the day it comes out?

i'm wondering this because perhaps when they start doing that revised official drivers will be out ?

 

I don't know about other countries but i can simply select Win7 on the drivers page and get all the drivers i want? Are these not official somehow?

 

Most (if not all) of the Win7 drivers listed on the Dell site are just the previous Vista drivers. I have compared byte size for several of them and the Win7 64 are the same as the Vista 64. At some point there will hopefully be drivers developed specifically to take advantage of the Win7 OS.

 

this is exactly what i was worried about. because for business laptops, especially workstations, the ISV certification process takes a while, and driver testing also takes longer than for consumer laptops as stability takes precedence over performance, so the trade off is different.

i'd rather hold off reformatting and installing for a few weeks if it meant i could get "proper" drivers at the time of installation.

what do you guys think? are the current drivers good enough? because a lot of the posts so far have been positive, except for bluetooth, audio, and fingerprint reader?

 

Ah i see.
All the drivers have been working great though, the BT and audio drivers are the only ones i needed to install to get full functionality. Haven't tried the fingerprint reader.
I was planning to do a complete fresh install when i get my Win7 copy and it would be nice to have true Win7 drivers then. I don't think i'll wait for em though.

 

Hi guys,

I'm in the same position, and I have to say that almost everything works 'out of the box' with Windows 7.

If you want Dell's drivers, their Windows 7 selection is a mixture of genuinely updated drivers, and Vista drivers that are known to work. If you read the description, 'Initial release for Windows 7' usually means it's an unchanged Vista driver that's known to work. If you see more extensive changes, then it means more work has gone in to them. However, don't expect completely rewritten drivers for Windows 7, the updates will be gradual.

The only thing that doesn't work is the fingerprint reader. Dell recently released Windows 7 drivers for the security hardware, but the Broadcom component (behind which the fingerprint reader is hidden) still dates from 2008 >< Of course you can use the Embassy Wave software, but it's very clunky

 

Everything has pretty much worked out of the box for me as well. I did have to download the nVidia drivers from the nVidia website to get the best performance, but otherwise everything has worked flawlessly.

 

is the notebook fussy about the driver installation sequence like it was under vista?

im downloading my student copy of windows 7 professional 64 bit rite now...slow connection lol.

i've never used an upgrade edition before, is it possible to do a clean install with an upgrade edition? i dont particularly like in place installs.

 

Good thread...I'm waiting on the Win7 Pro to arrive...looks like the usual suspects re drivers....i.e. Nivida, BT, etc....

 

When I installed Win7 on my M4400 yesterday, I installed the Nvidia Driver, Touchpad Driver, Bluetooth Driver, and the Dell SmartCard Reader driver. Everything else worked out of the box, and I did not have any issues with install order. I've never had issues with Dell driver install order as long as the chipset upgrade was done first, and I always ran Windows Update immediately so that all the hotfixes would be in place.