AMD indicated that its ATI Radeon graphics cards will not receive a Windows 7-compatible driver. The company says that its Vista-compatible drivers are still available and still being updated. The company also says that it won’t support WDDM 1.1 for Windows 7.
The move is the result of the company’s decision to end driver support for AMD DirectX 9 graphics cards. The current Catalyst 9.8 is the last available version.

AMD announced its move away from DirectX 9 in March 2009, in favor of DirectX 10, which is currently supported. The company says that Windows 7 DirectX 9 users should continue to use the Catalyst driver, which the company says it will update quarterly.

Maintaining Legacy Drivers

If the idea of maintaining your legacy drivers is troublesome to you, consider using a driver manager like Driver Detective. Even if you choose not to upgrade your Windows OS (now or in the future) Driver Detective can help you manage the drivers you need.

Driver Detective will locate, load and update drivers for all of the hardware you have installed. If a driver ever becomes corrupted, or is replaced by a newer version from the manufacturer, Driver Detective will discover this and load a fresh copy of the latest driver.

This ensures that your system will run smoothly and you can make driver problems a thing of the past. Driver Detective is one of the most trusted driver managers on the market today, and has been downloaded by hundreds of thousands of users who rely on it to keep their computer systems running smoothly.

Driver Detective can also determine when drivers are no longer needed. The system will remove or disable unused drivers to prevent them from interfering with computer operations.

Managing drivers can take an extraordinary amount of time. If you’re not a computer expert, or simply don’t have the time to unload and reload all of your drivers when you’re trying to troubleshoot a computer problem, consider loading Driver Detective and letting this fantastic software utility do the rest.

You’ll never have to worry about missing critical updates to your Windows drivers again. Driver Detective takes care of that professionally and reliably every time. You’ll always have the latest drivers for all of your Windows hardware. Better than that, Driver Detective can also help you solve problems before they start by identifying and replacing corrupted drivers immediately.

Photo Credit: Andy Melton, via Flickr

Despite Microsoft’s best efforts, some potential Windows 7 users will have to wait for updated drivers for their hardware and peripheral devices. HP, for example, released a table of supported Windows-7 compatible systems. The company says that systems that do not appear on the table of supported hardware will not be getting updated drivers that will enable them to run Windows 7.

Options For Unsupported Hardware

If you have hardware that is not yet supported with the correct driver, the first order of business should be to contact the manufacturer to see what their driver plans are. It’s possible that a driver for your hardware is in development, so all that’s needed is a little patience on your part.

If the manufacturer indicates that no driver is available and they do not plan to create one, you can ask them if they have any suggestions regarding third-party drivers that may work with your hardware. You can also do a little research to see if other users in your situation have found an acceptable workaround.

If you’re running your hardware with an older Windows OS like Windows XP, you may be able to run XP virtually after upgrading to Windows 7. The virtual XP will use all of your XP drivers, so you may not have to make much of an accommodation for your older equipment. To run XP in virtual mode, your computer will need to have a processor that supports virtualization and these services must be turned on. You’ll also need additional memory and hard disk space available.

If your hardware manufacturer has no driver available, doesn’t plan to make one and there is no third party support for your equipment, your best bet may be to do nothing in terms of upgrading. Not being able to take advantage of some of the new features of Windows 7 may be frustrating, but for specialized hardware, you may not have any other options.

You may also choose to replace your system with a newer system that supports Windows 7 directly. In this approach, you can retain your old hardware in a working environment, and migrate certain functions to a newer system that runs Windows 7. You may also find that Windows 7 opens up new alternative solutions for the functions that rely on Windows XP.

Ultimately, migrating to a supported OS will put you in the best position. Microsoft has already curtailed support for Windows XP and in the not-too-distant future, the company will drop support for this product altogether.

Photo Credit: Randy, Son of Robert, via Flickr

The Vista Penalty: What If You Didn’t Upgrade?For Windows users, October 22 represents among other things, Decision Day. When Windows Vista was released, it was hard for both Microsoft and its installed user base to make a good case for upgrading to Vista. Vista received a lot of bad press early on (and even late in the game) for not having compatible drivers available for third-party hardware. The lack of critical drivers did more than prevent users from upgrading; it gave them an excuse NOT to upgrade.

Drivers Won’t Be A Windows 7 Killer

Microsoft doesn’t have control over third party manufacturers, and these manufacturers rightly hold the blame (at least in part) for Windows Vista’s lack of popular success. There are other things that made Vista less attractive, and Microsoft is in the driver’s seat on those issues. (Lack of real Active Directory support, for example, meant that Vista was uninteresting to enterprise.)

Despite Microsoft’s efforts to kill Windows XP, Vista’s lack of credible interaction with Windows Server 2003 was real justification for enterprise to sit out the Vista upgrade. This time around, Microsoft comes armed with an upgraded Windows Server 2008 product that fits hand-in-glove with Windows 7. The roadblocks to enterprise adoption have largely been removed but that leaves enterprise users in the curious condition of having to do a complete clean installation to migrate to Windows 7. It also promises to be a bumpy ride until the migration to Windows 7 is complete.

Microsoft won’t spend too much time coddling Windows XP users who don’t want to upgrade. After release date, users will be able to buy downgrade licenses for a few months that will allow them to install Windows XP. In the spring, however, the downgrade license will be withdrawn, leaving volume-licensing customers as the only rightful installers of Windows XP media.

Microsoft insisted (and probably rightly so) that manufacturers needed to come across with a signed, functional driver for their products by release date if they want to keep their “Vista-compatible” logos on their products. Major manufacturers, including Intel, Nvidia and ATI already have their drivers ready to go.

Microsoft also made Windows 7 available as a very generous, very public beta. Right now, there are millions of computers running a version of Windows 7 that’s within a hair’s breadth of the release version, and there have been no major complaints from users regarding flaky or unusable drivers. For someone like me, that’s a comforting sign that the release will go smoothly and consumers can be relatively confident that if their computer is up to snuff, the Windows 7 migration should be straightforward – even if that does require a clean installation.

Photo Credit: Hectorir, via Flickr

With the Big Day just days away, expect to see a plethora of announcements from Windows hardware manufacturers about the availability of drivers for Windows 7. The release date is next Thursday, and Microsoft has put hardware manufacturers on notice that it expects working drivers to be available for Windows-compatible hardware when Windows 7 hits the streets.
What’s The Big Deal About Signed Drivers
For some users, the subtlety of having a signed driver might escape them. For Microsoft, producing a signed driver is moving toward the R-word – requirement. Now don’t get me wrong; there is still such a thing as an unsigned driver, but unsigned drivers represent (as far as Microsoft is concerned) a potential hazard that computer users and system administrators alike need to watch out for.

What exactly is a “signed driver?” A signed driver is an assurance that a downloadable driver was produced by what Microsoft terms “a legitimate publisher.” If you’re planning on installing unsigned drivers for Windows Vista, Windows 7 or Windows Server 2008, you’ll need to have administrator privileges. This is (presumably) to cut down on the ability of the end user to install – either purposely or inadvertently – potentially rogue drivers that could cause problems for a system.

Also, if you’re loading kernel-mode drivers on 64-bit versions of Windows Vista or Window Server 2008, these require Kernel Mode Code Signing (KMCS) to load.

Any driver that is hoping for the Microsoft “seal of approval” – that is, one that gets the Windows Logo mark – will need to be signed. Microsoft will not approve any unsigned drivers for use with the Windows Logo or Windows 7/Windows Vista-compatible programs.

At some point, these requirements may cause problems for users and/or administrators, but Microsoft’s toughened stance on Windows drivers stems from its less than pleasant experience with the Windows Vista release. Although Vista is about to be replaced with what promises to be a more robust, stable product, there are many hardware manufacturers that never produced a Vista-compatible hardware driver for their products. That situation left many Windows users in the lurch – not being able to upgrade because they would lose the use of critical hardware – or being forced to upgrade hardware for want of a working driver.

Microsoft is determined not to let third-party manufacturers sabotage the release of Windows 7 in the same way, so if nothing else, users should expect stronger driver requirements and a better complement of Windows drivers right out of the box on October 22.

Photo Credit: Microsoft