Seeking Advice on Windows 7 Ultimate Install, keep or dump it?

card readers on laptops/prebuilt machines often require you to visit the manufacturers site for the drivers.

if dell don't have the windows 7 drivers listed then try the vista drivers.

the optical drive issue is different, but again make sure you visit the dell website and get chipset drivers and intel storage managment drivers, make sure the smbus is installed.

while windows 7 does install drivers for most devices they are not often the correct ones but merely legacy style drivers to get you by untill you install the correct ones.

Gazz...

Thank you very much for the reply. This problem is resolved - more on that in a moment...

The real problem here is model number. At boot, this drive comes up as TS493A, and yet on my drivers disk (from Dell) its listed as TS363A. If I try to load the Firmware for either model, I get a message that the hardware is not compatible with the driver selected! I wrote Dell about this but have not heard back yet.

However, as I say, this problem seems to be resolved... Last night I did two Windows 7 Updates, one of them being the SP1 Service Pack. It took a while to run, but after it ran - Bingo! - the drive seems to be working perfectly! I didnt trust that so I loaded a DVD into it and watched the entire movie - no hiccups, no drive "going away", and no stall... So I can only assume that something in one of those Win 7 updates resolved this.

I still hope to hear from Dell - but as I say, I think I am out of the woods on this one.

Again, many thanks for your reply!