I was almost as excited as Navin Johnson ("The new drivers are here! The new drivers are here!") when I checked the Optional Updates section of Windows Update today on two different machines. Note the date stamp: October 22, 2009, which was the day when Windows 7 was released to the public. The top three downloads are for control software used with Microsoft wireless keyboards and mice, along with a detection driver for these devices. There was also a new driver for the Nvidia GeForce 8600GT display adapter:
I had not previously installed IntelliType Pro or IntelliPoint on either system, so this was a case of the right software being offered to me as an option. All four updates shown here were unselected, which is the way it should be.
It took two tries to get the software properly installed (I had to click the Try Again button in Windows Update). After finishing, the Microsoft Mouse and Keyboard Detection Driver was still shown as available, with a mysterious error (Code 80070103) next to its installation status. That error means the driver being offered (or a newer one) is already installed. When I waited about 15 minutes and checked again, the redundant update was no longer listed as available.
The control software enables features for your input devices that aren’t available with a generic driver. Pretty cool, actually. With a clean install, this is one of those things it’s easy to forget.
Not exactly “one stop shopping”, but the driver task is certainly pretty good now. Between Windows Update and the computer maker’s own support pages, it has all gone surprisingly well.
One trick: copy over the “drivers” and “DriverStore” folders from C:\Windows\system32 to a USB drive and if any of those Unknowns show up, have your Windows 7 machine go look in those folders. The older Vista drivers will likely work fine in 7.
Hopefully the 3rd party hardware vendors took the hint from Microsoft on Vista and are getting their act together. I hope we see a lot more drivers offered through Windows Update rather than having to hunt for them on the web.
Win 7 failed to find drivers for most of the on-board devices on three of my Dell PCs. But I had the driver disk from Dell, and they installed withoput a hitch. It was just a little bit more time and effort.