CYRION TECHNOLOGIES

When Windows 7 became available as RTM in the MSDN programm I chose first to update my trusty MSI Wind U100 notebook to the new operating system.

When I bought it about 1 and a half year ago it came with 1GB RAM and a 80GB HDD. I upgraded it immediately to 2GB RAM and a 320GB HDD and installed Windows Vista. Running Vista was a godd choice even though the aging XP was performing much better on the limited hardware resources. The most drivers from the MSI web-site also worked under Vista, but one could easely find updated drivers in Windows-Update or at Intel and Realtek.

I then installed Windows 7 as new and not as an update. This was tested to be more than 20 hourse, while 7 alone did a freshly in 20 Minutes from my DVD-ROM drive (I ruined the first installation due to a driver from my USB-Radio so I had to do it al over again two days later, this time in only 15 Minutes from an USB stick. Great!) All hardware was detected and run pefectly. No drivers installed from the MSI Wind repositopry (they were not even there by that time).

WLAN:

The only thing I installed was the SCM, which gave me the nice Icons for the function keys. But one thing I could not get to work even when I updraged to the W7 compatibled version of the SCM: Enable/Disbale WLAN. While Bluetooth works perfectly, the WLAN-Card is always on. I could not solve this other than to create two scripts

@echo off
netsh interface set interface wlan0  disabled

and

@echo off
netsh interface set interface wlan0  enabled

(you must replace “wlan0″ with the name of your wireless lan connection!)

Card-Reader:

Initially I also failed to note the absent of the Realtek card-reader. It was not detected and not installed. When we took a lot of pictures during the past few days, I wanted to shere them in the fasmily and started my netbook to read the SD-Cards and compile the photos on a CD-R. But the Card-Reader was not htere. So I installed the Realtek driver from the MSI archives. But no reboot no nothing would Windows7 bring to install the driver. I used the W7 compatibles one and the one I installed under Vista. Nothing.

The next day I wanted to look up something in the internet and started the netbook anew. And what do you know… Windows 7 found new hardware: namly the realtek card-reader. And then when I plugged in an SD-Card from my camera it also installed the memeory drive and assigned a a drive letter. So I guess the cold reboot did the trick in the end. Everything I tried the other day was not cold but a warm reboot. I did not switch the netbook completely off but just restarted it.

So what do I run now: Windows 7 Ultimate with all drivers from Windows-Update. MSI SCM for Windows 7 and the latest Realtek Cardreader Solution driver from the Realtek site (this is easy to find, since there is only one driver!)

[Update]
Last weekend I used the netbook to collect all my digital pictures from various SD-Cards. After some time suddenly the CardReader was gone. I did a cold boot and it was available again and worked flawlessly for several hours. So this issue is not fully resolved yet.