I have read 3-4 installation guides and everything poasted here, but nowhere did I see anything about installing Sata HD drivers, or others like onboard audio or upgrading video drivers. I had a hassle with Sata drivers on my present XP install and would like to not go through that again. if I decide to upgrade.
Scuzzy- you and I are using the same Gigabyte MB, and raptors, what was your experience with Sata when you installed Win 7 Beta?
Anyone shed some light here?
Bill
Windows 7 comes with native, generic SATA drivers, similar to the generic ATA drivers of previous Windows versions. Windows 7 should detect your SATA drive and install itself. You then have the option of updating the drivers to the drivers for the specific SATA controller that you have.
Buff
If you can, try to set your SATA controller to AHCI mode in the BIOS. Even my relatively old AMD SB600-based board works fine with the native AHCI driver.
Generally speaking, if you use either legacy IDE emulation mode or AHCI mode, you won't need to provide 3rd party drivers. These should only be required if you're using RAID, or RAID-style SATA.
I always prefer to use standard drivers.
I made no changes to my BIOS, and simply did a clean (custom) installation of Windows 7 Home Premium. I had no issues with SATA whatsoever, since SATA is natively supported by Windows 7.
I did download and install the latest nVidia graphic drivers, also without issues. As for the audio, I went with the default drivers included with Windows 7 and it worked flawlessly. I did not mess with the chipset drivers, either.
Thanks very much. That was exactly what I wanted to know.
Now I have to convince myself Win 7 would be worth the effort.
Bill