Windows 7 comes with a lot of drivers, but you might still have quite a few devices not recognized by the installer. Here is a short guide about how to find the proper drivers for the unknown devices.

1. Click on Start and type in Device Manager.
2. Click on Device Manager under Control Panel.
3. Scroll down and find the devices without drivers. These devices have a yellow triangle sign beside the icons.
   
4. Right click on the device you are interested in and select  Properties. We use High Definition Audio Device as an example.
5. Click on the Details tab and select Hardware Ids under Property. We can see that the Vedor ID is 8384 (VEN_8384) and the device ID is 7680 (DEV_7680).
   
6. With Vendor ID and Device ID, you can visit pcidatabase.com and find out about the company. In this example, the vendor is IDT (who bought Sigmatel) and the device is a SIGMATEL STAC 92XX C-Major HD Audio. You can then visit the vendor’s web site for drivers.

After identifying the vendor company, you might still run to the following situations:

• The vendor does not have Windows 7 drivers
  If the vendor still support Vista, you can try to use the Vista drivers on Windows 7.  You might need to install the drivers in compatibility mode.
• The vendor does not support the device any more
  Some vendors choose not to support some older devices. If this is the case, you need to find the drivers from the company which made your computer. For example, IDT bought Sigmatel and they decided not to support the device. You can not find any drivers for the device from IDT. Since this is a MacBook from Apple, I found the driver from the Boot Camp files supplied by Apple.

Days before Windows 7 goes public, Apple announces its new line up of Macs today. Here are some of the highlights.

Macbook

• Unibody enclosure
• 7-hour battery
• LED backlight display
• Glass multi-touch trackpad

Magic Mouse

• First multi-touch mouse

iMac

• Bigger 27″ or 21.5″ screen
• Comes standard with a wireless keyboard and a Magic mouse
• quad-core processor available

Mac Mini

• Snow Leopard server option available

[via Apple]

The Windows 7 Beta on my MacBook was about to expire, so I reinstalled Vista on it. After the installation, I put in the Leopard DVD and installed the drivers. Initially, the drivers installation was not successful. I just downloaded the BootCamp 2.1 update from Apple and intalled it. All the drivers except the audio driver were installed.

I tried different methods to install the missing audio driver, but Vista cannot find the proper driver for it. My other MacBook (early 2008) uses Realtek driver, so I thought this uses the same driver. I downloaded the latest driver from Realtek and tried different versions and they all failed to install.

Finally, I looked up the VEN(DOR) ID for the device and found that it’s from SigmaTel! I installed the SigmaTel driver from the Leopard DVD and it started to work right away. I am not sure why the BootCamp drivers installation did not figure out the right driver the first time, but I learned that I’d better checking the VEN(DOR) ID next time I ran into the same problem.

Just in case you don’t know how to check the VEN ID. You can right click on a device in Device Manager and select Properties. Under the Details tab, select Hardware Ids and you can see the VEN ID and DEV ID.

Here is a screenshot of one example.

In this case, the VEN ID is 1106 and DEV ID is 3403. After you know the VEN ID, you can use the site like PCIDatabase.com to search for the company.

One of my MacBook was purchased back in 2006. The battery was working fine until the beginning of this year. The capacity dropped like overnight. Suddenly, the fully charged battery could not last more than 40 minutes. At first, I thought I only need a replacement battery since the I had it for more than two years.

I ran across this page about battery problems for MacBook or MacBook Pro purchase between February 2006 and April 2007. If your battery has the following symptoms, you might get a free replacement.

• Battery is not recognized causing an “X” to appear in the battery icon in the Finder menu bar.
• Battery will not charge when computer is plugged into AC power.
• Battery exhibits low charge capacity/runtime when using a fully charged battery with a battery cycle count (as shown in System Profiler) of less than 300.
• Battery pack is visibly deformed.

I took my MacBook to Apple Store last week. They tested my battery on the spot and ruled my battery is eligible for a free replacement. They changed it with a brand new battery.

Note that not every MacBook or MacBook Pro battery is eligible. To recap the  three requirements:

1. The MacBook and MacBook Pro must be purchased between 2006/2 and 2007/4.
2. The battery has one or more of  the aforementioned symptoms.
3. The battery must be tested as BAD.

After installing Windows 7 x64 RC on my Core i7 workstation, I got to try it on my MacBook (early 2008) today. The installation procedure is similar to the procedure of installing Windows 7 Beta. Here is my notes about the process. The only thing different is the installation of drivers.

When I inserted the Leopard installation DVD, the setup.exe on the root of DVD automatically ran and notified me my MacBook is not supported for the 64bit installation. The installer did not continue. To force it to run, browse to the folder D:\Boot Camp\Drivers\Apple (D drive is the DVD drive for my system) and double click on BootCamp64.msi to install the drivers.

After the installation, reboot the machine. The microphone still doesn’t work after driver installation. You have to enable the microphone boost to use it properly. Please see this post for details.

Under Windows, you press Print Screen key to capture the full screen or alt + Print Screen to capture the active window. However, there is no Print Screen key on a MacBook. How can you capture the screenshots when you boot the machine to Windows OS?

One solution I found is to use the on-screen keyboard. Click on the Start and type On-Screen and click on On-Screen Keyboard to bring up the keyboard. Click on PrtScn to capture the whole desktop or press and hold the alt(option) key on the keyboard while click on PrtScn to capture just the active window.

The problem with this approach is that when you capture the whole desktop, the on-screen keyboard is also captured. This also happens when the keyboard overlaps with the active window because the on-screen keyboard is always on top. Here is a screenshot demonstrating this situation.

The other option is using a 3rd party program. The one I have been using is called ScreenHunter. I tested it under Windows 7 Beta and it worked great. You can download a free version here. Note that the default hot key is F6. If you have Boot Camp installed under your MacBook, you have to press and hold fn key when you press F6. Otherwise, it won’t capture the screenshot.

Does ScreenHunter work for you? Let us know what you think.

I used to have a lot of problems using the built-in disc burning function on Vista. Whenever I had to burn a data DVD, it took a lot of time in preparing those temporary files. The burning process often failed. In the end, I installed a program called DeepBurner to burn CDs and DVDs.

When Windows 7 Beta came out, I was curious about the disc burning capability. I didn’t get a chance to test it until yesterday. I tested it on a MacBook and the experience was the same as before. It still took a lot of time to prepare the temporary files and the process failed several times. The error message was hardware error which I know the hardware works just fine when I boot the machine to OS X.

Before I tried out DeepBurner again, there is one other disc burning software that has great reviews. It’s Totally Free Burner from DanDans. The UI is neat and wizard like.

You select the type of disc you want and the program guides you through creating the disc. Its user friendly design might save you troubles if you don’t know what you are doing. Unfortunately, the burning still failed on my test MacBook.

I then installed my old favorite DeepBurner Free. The free version allows you to burn data CD/DVD, audio CD or ISO image.

The user interface is not as fancy as other disc burning software, but its burning engine is very solid. I was finally able to burn some discs successfully on my MacBook.

After I installed the Realtek audio driver on my MacBook under Windows 7 Beta, I could hear music just fine. However, I found that I could not record anything through the microphone. I checked my other MacBook under Vista, and the microphone didn’t work, either. I checked another laptop with Windows 7 Beta, and still, the microphone did not work. I then realized that none of the built-in microphones under Vista and Windows 7 Beta worked.

Some tweaking about the microphone properties got it to work. Here are the steps:

1. Click on Start (the Windows icon) and type sound.
   
2. Click on Sound under Control Panel.
3. Click on Recording tab. Select Microphone and click on Properties.
   
4. Click on Levels tab. The default Microphone Boost is set to 0. Increase it.
   

Close all the dialog boxes, and the microphone will be ready for use.

When I installed Windows 7 Beta (Build 7000) on my early 2008 MacBook yesterday, the audio driver did not work. The driver provided by Boot Camp is not the right one. Using the hardware id, I learned that the audio card is made by Realtek. I downloaded  the driver directly from Realtek and it worked. Here is the download link.  The one I downloaded is Vista Driver (32/64 bits) Driver Version R2.14. Extract the files and run the setup.exe.

BTW, if you are looking for some older versions, you can use this ftp site.

ftp://202.65.194.211/pc/audio/

This is a mirror site used by Realtek. Note that the download speed is kinda slow, so be patient.

[Update: 11/16/2009]

The ftp site is protected by password now. It’s not working unless you know the username and password.

I got a chance to install Windows 7 Beta on my MacBook today. The installation is pretty smooth. The boot camp assistant has a detailed guide about installation. To get the installation guide, open Boot Camp Assistant under Mac OS and click on Print Installation & Setup Guide to print it. Follow the instructions for Vista. I’ll summarize the steps here.

1. Open Boot Camp Assistant and partition the hard drive for Windows 7.  You need at least 16 GB for it. I use 32 GB for my installation.

2. Once the partition is ready, insert the Windows 7 installation media and reboot the machine.

3. Installation begins after reboot. For more screenshots, please refer to this post. When you are prompted with installation type, click on Custom (advanced).

You need to install Windows 7 on Disk 0 Partition 3 BOOTCAMP. However, the partition is not formatted correctly. If you click on Next, the installer stops.

Click on Show details of this error and you see that this partition has to be formatted. Click on Drive options and then format the BOOTCAMP partition. When it’s done, you can continue the installer.

4. After a few minutes and the installation is done.

5. The final step is to insert the Leopard installation disc and install the additional Windows drivers.

Everything seems to be working fine except the sound driver. The system indicates it’s installed, but there is no sound and microphone is not working either. I tried some tricks that worked under Vista, but none of them works. I’ll post again once I got the audio to work. BTW, the machine is a MacBook (early 2008 model).