Today I set up a laptop for my daughter-in-law and I installed Windows 7 on it. The installation itself went rather smoothly. It was installing drivers that caused me a bit of frustration.
I already had the drivers downloaded (or so I thought) because I’d set up the same model laptop for my son a few months ago. Apparently this particular laptop had a few more devices include. After installing the drivers, I looked at Device Manger and saw four devices that sitll needed drivers — two unknown devices, a Broadcom driver, and something listed as “base system device.”
One of the unknown devices was the sensor for the fingerprint reader which I found by letting Windows redicover it. I found the device ID for the second one and figured out that it was for the HP 3D DriveGuard driver which I downloaded and installed.
The missing Broadcom driver turned out to be Bluetooth. I downloaded that driver from HP and installed it.
That left me with the base system device. Reinstalling the chipset drivers didn’t fix it. I was able to narrow it down to a driver for the smart card reader. I downloaded and installed HP’s driver but no go. Then I saw there was a JMicron SmartCard driver and so I downloaded and installed that. Finally, all the yellow exclamation marks were gone from Device Manager.
The drivers installed, I downloaded and installed LibreOffice, Gimp, VLC, Firefox, and Google Chrome. Then it was time to installed the 165 updates that were waiting.
In essence, this is one of the reasons I use Linux. Setting up a Linux system is generally much quicker and easier and with fewer headaches.
I had considered installing Linux Mint on it because she said the operating system didn’t matter and she was mostly going to use it for web browsing. Then she said something about possibly playing some games on it so I figured I’d better install Windows on it. I’ve noticed that her desktop PC is Windows 7 as are the kids’ laptops.
Filed under: Hardware, Windows | Tagged: drivers, installation, Windows 7 | 1 Comment »