windows 7 beta driver help please

Hi Guys,

Wonder if you can help me, I've spent the whole night on this forum looking for answers to my problem without sucess

I have a acer 6920G Gemstone, I have installed windows 7 beta but cannot get the touch panel or the empowering technologies button to work at all.

any advice apreciated. before i end up going back to vista

thanks in advance
Rebel

 

I can't answer this question, but have installed the beta Win7 on an old desktop to have a look. On that I used the Vista drivers and in the case of one pro audio card, XP drivers and most of the thing works OK. I can't say I'm too impressed by Win 7. Most of it works OK, and there are some Vista annoyances that have been reduced, but I have some serious networking problems and file permission problems so I'll leave others to thrash it on my behalf.
I have fed in a couple of complaints. I hope others do the same so that it's Microsoft's fault when things don't work. The situation with the Realtek on-board audio on my desktop is just as bad as it was under Vista. Crap concept, bizarre mixer and very unpredictable performance.

What I can't understand is why anyone would want to run beta software in a reasonably useful machine. I assume you have to replace the HD and go from there.

 

Did you do a clean install of W7 or an upgrade? I made a copy of the original Vista OS partition and then used this copy for W7 upgrade. All apps and drivers were maintained with the exception of Windows Mail, etc which W7 doesn't come with.

Wayne

 

I run XP-Pro, Vista-64, and W7 on the same HD...just boot the one I want to use and the other ones aren't seen.

Wayne

 

+1 suirp, i cant understand how anyone can run only 1 operating system on a computer. i also have 3 (vista 64, xp and server 2008 on trial) and keep image backups. if one goes down or gets in a mess (often) i can still use another and just reload corrupt one.

 

Maybe it's just a question of how the machine(s) are used. Here, the OS is just a tool and the data is the important stuff. Therefore when I work with software under a different OS, I really need to get confident with the OS first which would rule out letting the data anywhere near a beta OS.

I'm quite happy running multiple OS's, but these days I usually try to run them under virtual machine software rather than multi-booting.

Some time back I asked for help in trying to find which machines were affected by a certain audio problem. In the process someone flagged up a major flaw in the extract from zip process in the released version of Vista. (Thinks ... must test to see if Vista SP1 has cured this). To do any useful testing with beta Win7, I just feel I need a machine with copies of data, a lot of disk space and a lot of time. I wasn't querying multiple booting. I was querying the advisability and usefulness of putting time limited beta software anywhere near a working machine.

My experiences with networking under Win7 have been very mixed, and it is going to take a lot of time and work to narrow down what the problems actually are. For this, I need a dedicated machine that can be left running for days at a time. I moan constantly about the way Vista didn't appear to have been properly tested in the real world before release. Microsoft seem to have taken the message on board, so the least I feel I ought to do is to really hammer the beta software and raise issues as I find them. I just hope others will do the same.

Sorry about the length of this.

 

Hi, how did you try to install them, did you try them under compatabilty mode, ie right click on the installer?
Chris

 

All valid points, billaboard, and what I was implying was there is no risk to a working machine and a dedicated beta machine is not necessary if you use a good, reliable imaging program to protect yourself if something does mess up.

If I work on the same computer with the beta and my regular OS's, I find it is simpler to sort out problems when they arise because I'm usually using the same drivers and applications.

As a footnote: In all my years of experience using my imaging program, I have never experienced a bad image, so I guess that my level of confidence in this program allows me to feel that any problem that does occur can be quickly corrected by getting back to a known stable environment.

Wayne

 

Can you elaborate on this...?
Thanks

 

Well, for example (and I know it's not quite the same situation) here is part of the story here. I had a bunch of XP and W2k laptops, each one aimed at specific tasks - one for paperwork and accounts, one for C++ programming, one for software testing, technical drawings and so on. Over a few weeks I had a succession of mainboard and hard disk failures that really hit me badly, so I was reduced to dashing out and buying replacement machines quickly. At the time Vista was really the only thing available locally, so over a couple of months I bought an Acer 5102, an Advent with a large screen, and a Lenovo 3000 N100. The last was purchased specifically because it came with Vista Business and a statement that it could be loaded with XP. I had to have this because of the oldish software that was really wobbly on Vista, and I was running a business that involved hands on use of the laptops in the presence of clients.

I had a lot of difficulty getting the XP disks out of Lenovo, but eventually they came through. I then backed up the Vista Business installation (using the Microsoft backup software), and put a fresh hard drive in for the XP installation. This is what I am typing on now.

If I want to test something on Vista business as opposed to the other Vista machines, I just whip one HD out and put the other back in. This means no hassle with boot managers, no danger of accidental over writing of anything, and decent amounts of disk space (I do audio mainly).

With the older desktop where I am testing Win 7, I simply put another HD in and swap the connectors over to change from XP to Win 7. On that machine I have a data drive to hold the common data. On the laptops I have to use usb disks.

The problem I have is that the XP Lenovo only has a 120GB drive and because of all the programs that have had to be brought back to XP from Vista, it's almost full (just looked 4GB free), so dual booting that would be crazy.

As an aside, I've just bought an Acer 2920 in the hope that I can replace the 5102. The old Acers I used to use (TM 212, 223 etc) were great for swapping disks - just one screw and the caddy slid out. Modern Acers seem to make it much more difficult.

This probably doesn't answer the question, but maybe it shows some of my thinking

 

Thanks for the information, billaboard. I understand where you are coming from. I maintain 12 computers (5 desktops and 7 laptops) and appreciate the need to have a good procedure that works with this environment. Whatever one considers efficient and is comfortable with (and still allows time for sleep, exercise & meals) has to be utilised. I have swapped HDs in the past when using different OSs but now only use a single HD with multiple partitions. A separate partition for each OS, Pagefile, Utilities, and usually data. This allows smaller and quicker images of those partitions that need backing up. The size and cost of current HDs allows this luxury.

Wayne