Bloody Dell Windows 7 Upgrade Assistant!

Upgrade Assassin is more like it.

The upgrade kit comes with two discs. First you insert the Upgrade Assistant which checks for compatibility issues, then the actual Upgrade disc from MS. The Assistant found that the Wireless LAN Manager was incompatible with Windows 7 and asked if I wanted to uninstall it. I googled and found out that the WL Manager actually doesn't do very much, and you can just uninstall it and let Windows manage your wireless connections. I've done similar stuff with my older laptop before, so I figured it was safe enough.

Well, it didn't just uninstall the manager app, it uninstalled my wireless adapter itself (the driver). Now it can't find the bloody thing, even when I connected to the internet by wire (which was a few more steps since I'm not at all familiar with Vista and, besides, they had the ethernet adapter disabled).

Bah! Now I'm going to have to find the discs that came with the laptop and hopefully correctly identify one of them as having the driver. The laptop was only purchased a couple of months ago, so it's not like I've got some old machine here. Idiots!

Upgrades can be messy. I usually try to avoid them and go fresh. But sometimes you can't. If your hardware is pretty recent, you should have have many issues, but you never know.

Check this site, the Windows 7 Compatibility site.

http://www.microsoft.com/windows/compatibility/windows-7/en-us/default.aspx

Punch in your hardware and it will help you get the right / updated drivers.

I needed to find the 64-bit editions for some of my hardware. The only thing that is not working at all is my Logitech QuickCam Pro 3000, which is quite old. Not a biggy.

Question. I just got an Inspiron 1380 and the scroll bars on the touchpad do not work. Any suggestions? I spent an hour or so on the Dell support site and could not find a direct solution.

Well I finally managed to at least get wireless back. The Windows device manager wizard was pretty useless. The device appeared as "network adapter" in the device manager list, it could not identify anything about the device. When I tried searching for a driver it failed miserably, even when I loaded in the drivers disc that came with the laptop.

I ran the setup.exe on the disc and lo-and-behold it tells me that I actually have two wireless network adapters -- the Dell WLAN 1397 and 1510. Maybe it's just the 1510 but it can behave like a 1397 for b/w compatibility? Who knows. Anyhow, I installed the drivers so I'm now back to square 1.

shabbs wrote:Upgrades can be messy. I usually try to avoid them and go fresh. But sometimes you can't. If your hardware is pretty recent, you should have have many issues, but you never know.

Check this site, the Windows 7 Compatibility site.

http://www.microsoft.com/windows/compatibility/windows-7/en-us/default.aspx

Punch in your hardware and it will help you get the right / updated drivers.

I needed to find the 64-bit editions for some of my hardware. The only thing that is not working at all is my Logitech QuickCam Pro 3000, which is quite old. Not a biggy.

I didn't know you were a camgirl shabbs.

hemlock wrote:

shabbs wrote:Upgrades can be messy. I usually try to avoid them and go fresh. But sometimes you can't. If your hardware is pretty recent, you should have have many issues, but you never know.

Check this site, the Windows 7 Compatibility site.

http://www.microsoft.com/windows/compatibility/windows-7/en-us/default.aspx

Punch in your hardware and it will help you get the right / updated drivers.

I needed to find the 64-bit editions for some of my hardware. The only thing that is not working at all is my Logitech QuickCam Pro 3000, which is quite old. Not a biggy.

I didn't know you were a camgirl shabbs.

Gotta pay the bills man...

I ran just the upgrade disc (not the assistant) and everything went fine. Took a long, long time but when it finished I still had my wireless connection. I believe when I restored it I only installed the drivers, not the manager app, so perhaps I had Windows managing it by the time I started the upgrade. I know that after the upgrade I did not have to re-enter the SSID and the passphrase -- everything *just worked* after the upgrade.

I have yet to play around with it, so I still don't know what changed from Vista to Win7.

Here's a quick over view of what is new:

http://www.askvg.com/whats-new-in-windows-7-a-small-review-with-screenshots/

http://blogs.zdnet.com/Bott/?p=653

Also, the Windows UAC seems to be a bit more flexible and not as annoying as it was in Vista.