I have a kind of old laptop, a Dell Inspiron E1705, and it has an ATI Radeon x1400 graphics card. I really want to install Windows 7, but I'm not sure if this card will be able to support the Aero interface. Will everything go smoothly?
ATI doesn't support the x mobility series anymore.
737-26978: Windows Vista Drivers for Mobility Radeon Products
Try your computers manufacturer website to see if they have any drivers. Otherwise, you're out of luck.
Will I even be able to run the OS, though? Or will I just not have transparency effects and things like that?
You should be able to run the OS.
Aero may or may not work, probably not.
You can try downloading the latest drivers from your manufacturer, they may still work in Windows 7, especially if they worked in Vista.
Thanks for the help, man. One search through this forum and I found a link to this site, where there's a link to a driver download. My card was listed under the ones that worked, and I downloaded it, installed the driver, and restarted, all successfully. My driver version is different now. Hopefully this will help.
If you want to know if your systen will run windows 7. You can download and run windows Upgrade advisor and it will tell you if any of your hardware will affect the running of 7 DL here Windows 7 Upgrade Advisor - Download - Microsoft Windows
I have been running Windows Vista on my Inspiron e1705 (with an ATI x1400) for almost since its release. And have been running Windows 7 since the very first beta releases. Never any problems that I can report outside of the fact this laptop is getting a little too old for me. I need more power D:
Also there is the lack of good x64 support.
Wow, that's the best news I've heard all day! I should probably mention that I upgraded the ram on this machine to two gigabytes, so i'm hoping that will help windows 7 run smoothly.
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