There is a New Soundmax driver for AD2000 and AD1988 for Windows 7. I had tested it in my Windows 7 64bit.

I had a new Asus Crosshair II Formula motherboard from RMA the Crosshair. With the help of the new SoundMax driver, my computer work great!

Download the SoundMax driver via the FTP server:
ftp://ftp.asus.com.tw/pub/ASUS/misc/audio/AD200B_6570_Win7.zip

Intel has been updating many of their drivers for Windows 7. Currently, I find some Windows 7 drivers on the Intel Download Center.

Intel Wireless WiFi Drivers Links

If you can not find win 7 drivers, try the Vista drivers for your Wireless cards in Windows 7. The Vista drivers can work especially if you install they in compatibility mode.

Dell is jumping in to help business (commercial) customers get ready for Windows 7 by offering Windows 7 drivers for their commercial desktop and laptop PCs. They are posting their Windows 7 drivers here (see Drivers and Downloads on left-hand navigation).

By offering drivers for their commercial desktop and laptop PCs, Dell is helping business customers with Dell PCs in their environments prepare for Windows 7 deployments.

For more information, see this blog post on Dell’s Inside Enterprise IT Blog.

If you are looking to waste lots of your time I suggest you try to download drivers from the Dell website.

I had a friend call me today. He just did a format / reinstall on his Dell Inspiron 8600 laptop and needed drivers.

He said that every time he tried to download from Dell, it didn’t work.

Smugly I thought I would have this problem fixed in 5 minutes flat.

2 hours later I still could not understand why every driver I downloaded turned into this:

Let me take that back. I knew exactly why it looked like that – I needed to have the Dell driver download manager installed. But the big question was, where in the hell was it?

I searched for hours, and finally came across an amusing blog post. The short version is Dell is making the driver manager optional.

Here are some of my favorite comments from it:

1. Currently utterly scuppered by Download manager. Just get rid of it. The basket of download links was useful but now Im currently stuck trying to locate the huge number of dell cookies on my system to remove the one thats stopping me from having a choice in a download. Restarting the browser and repicking the drivers is a pain. The job of downloading drivers has gone from a 5 minute task to 60 minute distraction. Where can I send the bill for my time that the clients are not going to pay ?

2. I wanted to download one driver today. In the past, that would have taken less than 5 minutes. Today, because I clicked on the DM link, it took almost four hours to figure out what happened to my system, fix it, and then get the driver.

I suppose Dell has invested too much in this travesty to discard it. Too bad — it would have been better if you used that time and money to improve the ability to diagnose problems and find solutions rather than complicate the process of downloading.

If nothing else, give us the ability to opt out of DM forever. I do not want to keep seeing the dialog box asking how I want to download files. I never want to use DM.

Also, please be kind to those who have not yet used this thing and warn them it is fundamentally different — and make it eash to opt out if the person makes the unfortunate decision to use it.

3. Can anyone explain how to get the option back to download via the web option? After installing and uninstalling the Dell Driver Download software program, I no longer have the option to download via the web either.

So where did I make my mistake? The download manager is optional, but I could never find a link to download it, nor could I find a way of switching back to download without it.

In that same post I found out that the trick was to delete the Dell cookies from my web browser.

Then, I went back to the downloads page and picked the standard option:

Just look at that window for a moment. See how easy it would be to click that first option? If you did, you are now stuck.

How nice.

When I picked the second option I could then download drivers without any issue.

Still I was curious. Did I miss something? Did I blow past a prompt to install a download manager plugin for FireFox? Or was Dell’s website so inept that it had no working download manager for FireFox?

I cleared the cookies, and started a new download.

I chose the Dell Download Manager option.

Same thing as before. No prompts, no FireFox plugin, I was simply directed to the drivers page.

From that point on there was no way to download a driver without:

1. Digging through my cookies

2. Removing the entries for dell.com

3. Choosing the second option when a download started.

What about IE? I fired up IE for the first time in 3 months and went to the Dell website. I picked the Download manager option.

Sure enough it installs an IE plugin (Requires a 53 MB install of .NET 3.5 – Whoo Hooo!)

So. What is the lesson? Make damn sure you pick that second option the next time you are on Dell’s website.

Update: After more digging I discovered that if you install these two updates from MS you can get it to work under FF:

Microsoft .NET 3.5 Service Pack 1

Microsoft .NET Assistant version 1.1

Still. That is a huge amount of crap you need to wade through to just get some drivers.

Now that the Windows 7 Beta has been out for a while, I’d like to highlight how folks can try out Windows Touch, Windows 7’s new multi-touch capabilities.

In order to take advantage of it, you are going to need a PC that supports multiple touch points. Today – there are a few PCs on the market to choose from:

• HP TouchSmart All-in-One PCs (IQ500 series & IQ800 series)
• HP TouchSmart tx2 Tablet PC
• Dell Latitude XT Tablet PC

To enable multi-touch capabilities on these PCs running the Windows 7 Beta you will need to make sure you have the latest multi-touch beta drivers. The driver allows the digitizer screen to support multiple touch points. Remember these are beta drivers, they still need to pass through our rigorous Windows Logo process before they are final, we can’t guarantee that all pre-Windows 7 PCs will have logoed drivers.

• For HP TouchSmart All-in-One PCs: The driver is available from Windows Update. After you have installed the Window 7 Beta, open Windows Update from the Start menu. You might have to click the “Check for Updates” link on your left so it will find the driver, it is Optional right now so you’ll have to select it before it will install.
• For the Dell Latitude XT and HP TouchSmart tx2 Tablet PCs: the drivers are available now on N-Trig’s website. N-Trig is the company that makes the digitizer in these PCs (you should read the release notes, there are some limitations, like no pen support you should be aware of and how to switch between Windows Vista and Windows 7). Please also note these are beta drivers and are not supported by Dell or HP.

Many features in Windows 7, which are available today in the Windows 7 Beta, take advantage of multi-touch capabilities and I thought I’d highlight a few with some tips here.

To make sure multi-touch is working try our new Paint. The latest version of Paint has some cool new brushes that are designed for multi-touch, click on the Brushes gallery and pick any one (I like the Oil Brush). Now try finger painting – this is also the easy way to see how many fingers your PC supports at the same time, some support two at a time, others support 4 or more.

Once you are done “painting” - try out Internet Explorer 8. The big touch feature here is panning; you can place your finger anywhere on a page and drag up or down to scroll the page – that’s a lot easier than trying to touch the scrollbar. You can also go back and forward between pages with your finger using Flicks: try flicking to your right (as if you were going back in a book) to go back.

You can also use touch to navigate along the taskbar. The new Jump Lists on the taskbar are touch optimized, instead of right-clicking on one of the icons on the taskbar, trying dragging up on it with your finger to literally pull the menu up.

Windows Media Center is also touch optimized. Ben Reed, Senior Product Manager for Windows Media Center, demoed this for Channel 10.

One last tip: To make buttons and controls bigger and easier to touch, you can tell Windows to display everything larger – this has really improved in Windows 7. Go to the Start menu and type display, and then open the Display Control Panel (which should be at the top of the Start menu). Choose the Medium (that’s what I use) or Larger size and you will find that everything is easier to target with your finger.

Similar to the standards patches and updates service that Microsoft provides, independent manufacturers of your PC parts such as your video card, BIOS and network cards offer occasional updates to address issues such as driver incompatibilities and crashes that stem from the use of incompatible drivers.

Now these updates do not solely cater towards people encountering problems with the drivers. Updating them can also help stabilize your system resources but some could care less. Unless the time comes you consider formatting your computer for one reason or another, these driver updates can come in handy.

But the thing is, not all people are aware of these updates. You may say that they come out only by accident or if you happen to sign up with the actual hardware vendor. As a whole these updates have minimal impact but if the old drivers were giving you problems, then it is best to check out the updated drivers that are free for use by anyone normally on the vendor website.

So if you want to avoid the problems of finding out later on that your current drivers do have bugs that need fixing, maybe it would be best to download the updated drivers and override the old ones. It doesn’t take much effort although make sure you can roll back the drivers in case issues suffice. Remember that upgrading and updating are constant. Latest versions do not always mean they will be the last.