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Current state of Win 7-64 and some questions

BonzaiDuck

BonzaiDuck

Lifer
A friend upgraded directly from Win XP 32-bit to Win 7 64-bit.

I had upgraded earlier (upgrade meaning loosely -- "moved up to newer OS") to VISTA-64.

I had also temporarily installed Win 7 64-bit RC1 to a computer for a few months to toy with it. By that time, Vista-64 had gone into Service Pack 2, and all such systems are working perfectly.

But my friend had been one of those mainstream users who had shunned VISTA after the initial release disaster. I touted the advantage of 64-bit OS's to him, suggesting he should go with Win 7 (because of his skittishness about Vista).

He's disappointed because there seems to be a "driver gap," which I had also noticed in RC1 but accepted as a fact-of-life in Beta versions. And for me -- I decided not to move to Win 7 until there had been at least one service pack release. VISTA-64 is just working too darn well at the moment.

We've had a discussion. I remember scanning some articles prior to Win 7's release. I have assumed that Win 7 was built on a revision of the VISTA kernel. Is this true? They only had a couple years between the VISTA releases and Win 7 to develop the latter, and I would guess that this was the pattern of development.

Also, I think I recall that some people had given advice: "IF there are no drivers for some piece of hardware (scanner, printer, etc.) with Win 7, try the VISTA drivers." If some VISTA drivers work in Win 7, then I'd guess my answer to the earlier question is "TRUE."

COMMENTS?
 
Correct - In the cases where there are no Win 7 drivers, you are normally safe using Vista 64 drivers.
 
Vista and Windows 7 use the same driver architexture. While i'm certain there are some differences in drivers that are optimized for Windows 7 versus Vista, they are for the most part compatible. The driver gap is mostly gone now, especially for 64-bit drivers. Its still possible you might have some obscure piece of hardware that you won't be able to find drivers for, but that was also true when XP first came out. Most mainstream hardware has 64-bit drivers readily available. I've been running Win7-Pro-64 since launch with no driver problems whatsoever.
 
That confirms what I'd assumed all this last year.

My understanding is rusty, but the MS OS architecture of bygone days included a "kernel" and a "hardware layer." The casual question -- answer to which I might DEDUCE from the two posts so far confirming my understanding about the drivers -- relates to whether they developed Win 7 "from scratch," or revised the VISTA kernel. I would think that a development time of just a couple years or so -- despite Microsoft's size and capability -- indicates that they took the best of VISTA and revised it to produce Win 7. The marketing of Win 7 for its first release was as much of a success as the OS itself, because the initial user experience wasn't a total disaster as it had been for Pre-SP VISTA.

But --yeah -- I recall using a VISTA driver successfully even with my Win 7 RC1 installation (when I still had it.)
 
Unless there is some special circumstances Microsoft does not write drivers for 3rd party hardware, and applications.

The drivers that are included in the release of the OS' are drivers submitted to Microsoft by the original vendors.

If a vendor does not care about writing x64 drivers, or does not want to submit the one that they wrote because they deviate from solid standard, the drivers will not be on included in the RTM/SP, or whatever release.

Thus one of the ways to try to get some action is to contact the Vendor/manufacturer of the missing drivers and "bug" them.

.
 
One issue you may encounter with x64 is that the drivers have to be signed. There are ways around it but it can cause problems if you have hardware that someone has produced a driver for but has not signed it . 32 bit will warn you that it isn't signed but will let you install it after that.

I have written some drivers for older hardware to work in win7 but because of the signing issue they do not work in x64. Certificates for signing drivers are anywhere from several hundred dollars to several thousand . It really makes no sense because anyone with the cash can get a certificate with no credentials needed or testing of the driver. Just another way to make money for verisign and the other licenses. Pay the cash, get the certificate and you can sign drivers all in the same day.
 
I have had only one problem with drivers on Win7-64 and that is with my Linksys wp300n wireless card. The driver that is on the install disk works. The driver from the upgrade site does not work and kills the wireless connection. Linksys support wanted me pay another $80 in 6 months for their latest wp610n card. I had to do a re-install and that is when I noticed that original driver worked.
 
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