A lot of you guys must have bought PCs with Windows Vista installed in it, and then upgraded to Windows 7 when the latter was released. Those who did it the recommended way, i.e. through your PC manufacturer, wouldn’t be facing any hardware problems.
The rest of you (and myself), who got a licensed copy of Windows 7 directly from Microsoft and installed it on your computer, might have run into some issues.
I was really unhappy with Windows Vista that came with my HP laptop. So the moment Windows 7 RC was released, I went for it. While the OS itself was pretty fantastic, there did exist some glitches – a new biometric technology in Windows 7 meant that my fingerprint reader stopped working. The memory card reader and the infrared receiver were also quite wonky. The situation stayed more or less the same throughout the RC phase, but once Windows 7 final hit the market, HP and the other PC manufacturers started releasing Windows 7 specific drivers, which were then pushed to users via Windows Update. However, not all drivers got updated that way. Actually, all three of my hardware issues continued even after installing a fully updated version of Windows 7 Professional. A quick glance at “Devices and Printers” confirmed this :
Thankfully, Devices and Printers does a lot more stuff than displaying your hardware components. You can actually troubleshoot the problematic components right from its interface! Simply right click on any component that has a yellow triangle on it, and select ‘Troubleshoot’.
Windows will start the required troubleshooter and, more often than not, come up with a solution for the problem.
Click on ‘View solution…’, and Action Center will show you all the required information for squashing the issue.
In my case, the Action Center redirected me to the required links for all my malfunctioning / absent drivers and I was able to fix the hardware issues.
Windows 7 has a LOT of neat features, and this is definitely one of them. If you’re facing hardware issues like me, hop over to Devices and Printers and have them fixed! :)