Poor software engineers just finished crafting the final touches on those Vista drivers and Microsoft slaps them in the face with Windows 7 – now they have to fill up this huge drivers pit left by it. Fortunately a lot of Vista drivers work out-of-the-box on Se7en; but some just don’t.
Microsoft saw this coming and this built this great tool called “Program Compatibility” which helps you run applications that were meant to be run on different Windows versions – so this works nicely for all software including drivers.
A huge plus in my opinion was the fact that before I was on my desktop I already had the wireless drivers installed and pretty soon the video ones too. I have a 6720s laptop with pretty much basic stuff as far as chipsets and all that – nothing too complicated.
I will stop here because I will soon write a post about my Windows 7 experience – so let’s continue with how I managed to get a great sound out of my Creative USB Sound Blaster Live! 24-bit sound card on Windows 7.
So when I tried installing the Vista drivers from the CD that came with the sound card it told me that this drivers weren’t compatible with my version of Windows.
So I started the Program Compatibility wizard and pointed it to the setup.exe file from the CD. This also didn’t work because the initial installer launched a separate installer depending on what I wanted to install or leave out from the software package.
So I headed back over to Program Compatibility and pointed the application to setup.exe – this time from \audio\setup folder on the CD. Installed the driver without any problems, restarted the computer. All seemed fine but when I tried to play a song in Winamp I realized the woofer was dead – more than that the system was running in 2 channel mode even though it said 5.1 in the Creative Audio Console.
Next, I launched the Creative Software AutoUpdate application from the Start menu. I downloaded and installed the new drivers with Program Compatibility as indicated above – the path for the downloaded software is c:\Users\All Users\Creative\Software Update\cache\ as the application states.
Same stuff, 2 channel mode but the difference was that this time the Audio Console said 2 channel instead of 5.1. Headed to Creative.com (won’t link to them) and after searching by the classical means you try to find a driver to download from a hardware producer I lost my hope.
In the end I ended up on SoundBlaster.com and there I saw a logo that said “Get the latest beta patch for Windows 7″. Clicked on it, got me to a page where only the header of the site was displayed and under it some VBScript runtime error. Thank god I am a guy that knows how to pull information from sites with such poor navigation and maintenance work.
I ended up clicking on a link which should have pointed me to the download page for that particular file. It pointed me to a page saying “Sorry, your search did not return any results.”. So I copied the file name and Googled it – what every decent minded person would do nowadays. Found the file ready to be downloaded on a weird site written in Chinese – wouldn’t be surprised to be a warez site.
Downloaded the file, this time I didn’t use the Program Compatibility program because theoretically the software was meant to run on Windows 7. So it did as I am writing this post while listing to Crowded House – Don’t Dream It’s Over on my SB Live! powered audio system :)
Here is the troubled driver to download at your convenience.
Yesterday I just installed Opera 10 and after a few minutes of browsing told an associate of mine how great this Opera 10 was. He asked me what is my favorite upgrade. A rather normal question. Without any hesitation I replied “speeeeeeed”. I mean let’s face it, Firefox 3 doesn’t come close to that kind of speed and resources flexibility – I guess that’s the price paid for all those extensions and other stuff that overload the browser and transform it into a RAM hungry machine.
My new Mac Mini
It’s a late 2009 model with the following specs:
I have it for about 7 days + and I can’t say only that I am very enthusiast about it. I am very glad and grateful that finally I was able to make the switch that I was dreaming about for quite some years now. So all the thanks go to my business partner :)
I also bought a Mini DisplayPort to VGA adapter for one of my 22 inch widescreens. My Logitech Wave Cordless kit runs smoothly on the new Mac, just as advertised. Performance ? Sky high. Crashes ? Only a Firefox one so far (2 instances, 6+ tabs per instance).
I’ve managed to migrate all of the Windows apps I’ve been using onto my Mac. Great alternatives or even built-in functions took over.
So I’m very happy to say that this will be my only developer machine. Stable, nice and clean, fast and BSOD-free. I like the Apple way of getting things done so I’ll probably buy some more stuff from them in the future. Perhaps the iPad ? Who knows ? :)
Other cool gadgets are my new companions but I don’t intend to write about them right now. Lunch is waiting for me and then work. Just wanted to notify you guys about me finally switching to a Mac.
OK, so here’s a little sneak peek of my new desk (left out other gadgets to keep focus):
Stripped desk