More Than 3 Out of 4 Enthusiasts Reject Windows 8

Win 7, although not perfect is the best available. I find it the best ver MS has ever put out.

I'd caution the use of Windows delivered graphics card drivers. After one bad experience I'd recommend going to the manufacturer's website. In my case it is NVidia. I also prefer manual updates to my printer drivers. So I select automatically notify but let me select.
Generally speaking though Windows 7 appears quite good at getting you the drivers you need.
I'd also recommend making an image before installing a major driver like a graphics driver and not rely on a system restore.
Just my opinion though.

As a slight aside - I have been led to believe that it is best to turn system protection off when using SSDs.

System restore is a program intended to restore to particular point in time. To do that it uses part of a shadow copy, and deletes new files.

Shadow copies are images. One the great things MS has done. The system restore program has it's quirks, but you can always restore a shadow copy, or bits of it yourself.

HammerHead said:

How about drivers for a lighted steel series keyboard. Three different colors plus different arrangements for lighting. I am not going to get it out now and go through it for you. Take my word for it. There is some drivers that Win 7 was not prepared to deliver.

Well spoken! After countless 7 installs on different machines you'll always find some you have to go back to the manufacturer's support site for. That list will often include Wi-Fi drivers as well as ones for the touchpad for instance the 8 laptop one friend bought off of someone else when the touchpad as well as 8 didn't work out for the bought new model.

When looking into what support that laptop had the Toshiba site also saw 7 x64 drivers showing they had the option for the 64bit 7 on that particular model with 6gb of ram. Likewise other then what comes included with OEMs as far as the prepackaged hardwares you often need to look things up for addons like a fancy external keyboard, printer, or printer/scanner etc. since not all drivers are found through Windows updates!

Since Vista days Dell has offered new systems with the choice of OS so you know they will be keeping the driver sets for XP(usually older model at this point) and up available depending on how new or old any model is. The newest would certainly be seeing 7 and likely but not always Vista support.

mjf said:

I'd caution the use of Windows delivered graphics card drivers. After one bad experience I'd recommend going to the manufacturer's website. In my case it is NVidia. I also prefer manual updates to my printer drivers. So I select automatically notify but let me select.
Generally speaking though Windows 7 appears quite good at getting you the drivers you need.
I'd also recommend making an image before installing a major driver like a graphics driver and not rely on a system restore.
Just my opinion though.

As a slight aside - I have been led to believe that it is best to turn system protection off when using SSDs.

I also had a bad experience while using Windows to update my drivers automatically. It messed up my NIC card by changing companies. I had Realtek prior that but once it updated it changed to Centrino. At the time it happened I didn't know it because it was automatic. And I'm not at all savvy when it comes to understanding wireless networking.

Anyway all of a sudden I started getting dropped from my Internet service constantly. I would get pop up messages that I didn't understand. The lease time went from 3 days to 2 hours and at the end of that 2 hours I would get dropped - eventually I could get back on but most it would take up to 10 minutes sometimes unless I manually changed adapter settings from automatic gateway, ip address, dns server, etc. to specific numbers. back and forth - this went on for months. I called ISP they didn't know squat....Eventually it stopped dropping me when the lease was up and it renewed the lease automatically but I still don't understand why it did that..