OT : Core i7 laptops

Anyone got one?

Dell and HP are the only ones making them at the moment IIRC, and from the
benchmarks they do seem rather tasty.

Only niggle in my mind is Windows 7 is just out, will the driver situation be
as shit as it was when Vista came out? [1]

And will it be quick enough for reading UKRM and email? And playing
solitaire?


[1] Sony's early Vista laptops had very slow buggy drivers to start with, and
as they revise the laptops frequently they haven't bothered to make un-buggy
drivers.

 

Unlikely - Vista drivers work perfectly on Win 7.

 

Laptop, no. Desktop, yes. And it's absolutely blistering. Handles Zork 2
at almost 25fps.

 

It's that time of year, so... "Oh, no they don't!"

<fx: evil glare at laptop with nvidia GeForce 5650 graphics - which
worked perfectly under Vista, but are completely and utterly unsupported
and undrivered under W7>

 

Oh, ye olde graphics.. Try this to force newer drivers to work with
it....
http://www.vista123.net/content/nvidia-mobility-modder-tool-10-final

 

took a blunt brush and painted...

For bog standard hardware I've no doubt thats true.

As laptop manufacturers make new models more often than I eat roast dinners,
and laptops don't use bog standard mobos with well known chipsets and
supporting hardware, therein lies the problem I'm worried about.

And Adrians just proven your statement wrong anyway

 

What's not bog standard about an intel chipset these days?

There's only 1 mobile chipset for the i7 currently - the intel capella
one. plus if you're buying a laptop with the windows 7 already on
it'll have been set up with all the right drivers.

and if not, here they are:
http://downloadcenter.intel.com/Sea...=Intel®+Chipset+Software+Installation+Utility

Yeah, and my car doesn't run on steam, but it was a valid technology
in the mid 1800's when his graphics chipset was made.

 

The laptop's less than 5 years old - and was a fairly top-spec machine at
the time. P'raps you missed the bit where I said there were Vista drivers
- it was playing perfectly happily under Vista at full 1920x1200?

The Vista drivers will not install under Win7.

 

Even if you right click and set the properties of the exe to run it in
vista compatible mode whilst installing?

Also 5 years is an eternity in computing terms. A whole 2.5 iterations
of moore's law..

 

No matter what you do.

nVidia's website basically says "Nope, don't even ask. We ain't going to
bother".

LaptopVideo2Go.net seem to do "parallel" nVidia driver hacking - but they
didn't support it at the time. Haven't tried of late, since it's really
just a scratch/test machine.

Shouldn't matter - after all, Vista drivers work fine... Right?

 

Well it's the first time I've encountered a driver playing awkward
with win7, and if it was going to be one it'd be nvidia.. the 7050
graphics in my sisters hp laptop were total crap too IIRC.

Personally though I even had win7 working fine on my netbook for a
while, using a mix of vista drivers not encountered any flakyness, and
on 3 different desktops, rangoing from a newish Q6600 back to an old
single core amd 1.2 ghz athlon xp.

 

took a blunt brush and painted...
Adrian, tried extracting the contents of the EXE and manually installing the
drivers? And hacking the INF files if Win7 refuses to install them citing
incorrect hardware.

It runs like shit on this Sony VGN A197VP. Chipset drivers, hardware buttons
for brightness, volume, mute, DVD eject, graphics drivers can't even control
brightness, power saving, they all either don't work at all or have problems.
Plus it just runs slowly in general, slower than the Atom netbook I've got
thats running Win7 RC1. (runs XP very nicely)


This is what I mean about laptops. Desktops are just a box with standard bits
in it, laptops have loads of added bits (nearly always controlled via I2C
comms but that's just useless info like all the hardware buttons, whatever
extra bits they have added to the custom mobo, the close integration of the
display needs support from the drivers to control brightness, contrast,
expansion of low res, etc, etc. You know what I mean?


For this machine Sony aren't bothering to do any drivers for this laptop for
Win 7. Lots of people have suggested many ways of installing the Vista
drivers, even Sony have posted something stating the order of installation of
the 5 or so drivers, still don't work properly.