Windows 7 video support

[Bruce123]

We've done some limited testing of Windows 7 running on our oldest hardware (which happens to be 1.7Ghz and 2.4ghz P4 1GB RAM). It seesm to run well, apart from one thing... no driver for the onboard Intel graphics. Unless this is resolved, it may actually scupper the option of installing it onto the 180 PCs which are are this spec in Summer 2010. Does anyone have any opinions on this? I don't think it's worth upgrading these with better graphics cards. We have to hold on until we can afford to replace them.

 

Thanks,

 

Bruce.

[Michael]

Intel are generally very good with drivers and their website is fairly easy to navigate around. If there aren't Windows 7 drivers yet, I suspect there will be shortly (next few months).

[DMcCoy]

Are there any vista drivers? If there aren't any for vista then the chances for Windows 7 will be miniscule.

 

If there are Vista ones then they are worth a try, although intel have a bad habit of not getting drivers signed by the whql which makes life difficult.

[SYNACK]

Even XP drivers will work, they will not be WDM ones so no aero but the machines are still functional and given the cards there would be no aero support anyway. I had this issue with Vista on some sh***y Dells, again intel stuff but in typical fashon neither intel nor dell bothered to continue supporting them.

 

Anyhow, I just got the XP driver off the vendor site (dell in this case) and attempted to install. This of course failed due to badly coded limits on the driver package. At that point I ran the installer (to its start screen) to extract the files into the temp directory and then copied the raw drivers out. I then installed these manually and it all worked fine. I later integrated these into my MDT distribution share so they just install transparently when the OS is first installed.

 

Unless you are going 64 bit which the processors you meantioned are not going to support then this method should work for you too.

[Bruce123]

No Vista support unfortunately (PCs were purchased in 2002/2003), but it's very interesting to hear that XP drivers may work. We'll look into this. Thanks, Bruce.

[Psymon]

I installed XP Intel 915 drivers onto a Vista machine and got the control centre and everything.

 

It even had a tick box for "Run WinSAT after restart"

 

Si