I suppose the URL of this blog gives it away, so nobody will be shocked to hear that I’m often slow to adopt technology.
So I only recently moved to Windows 7 from Windows 2000. You see, there’s nothing really wrong with Windows 2000.
What is wrong is that the latest ChromeFoxEra doesn’t run on Windows 2000 any more, and the latest Flash plugins don’t plug into the earlier versions of ChromeFoxEra, and the older Flash plugins won’t play Youtube movies any more because of a completely misguided opinion that one can make it impossible to download movies off the ‘net if you use the latest greatest features of Flash.
Or something like that.
And with both my home PC and my work PC now running Windows 7 (Classic desktop theme, animations and special effects very much “off”) it was time to upgrade the Mini 9 from XP to 7.
Google gives many hits on how to do this. But those websites / blogs don’t exist any more.
Fortunately we have the Wayback Machine, which saved a copy of multimolti‘s blog which is OK and a copy of Rick White’s blog which is excellent.
So I followed that, except that I used the very excellent Rufus to make a bootable USB stick.
Peeve: vlite is a nifty tool, but it needs the Windows Automated Installation Kit (WAIK). Download vlite, 1.4 megabytes. Download WAIK, 1.4 gigabytes. Microsoft needs to take some lessons from Steve Gibson.
Vendor 197B, Device 2382 / 2383 : Card Reader from JMicron, download drivers here.
ACPI\CPL0002: Battery meter, install R192569.EXE.
Touchpad driver: From Synaptics. Yes, you have to download the 118 megabyte file for Windows XP, Vista, 7 and 8, 32 and 64 bit. I guess it’s more convenient for them that way. And you then have to go to Device Settings / Settings to turn off tapping (which is the only reason I needed this driver anyway).
(http://www.mydellmini.com/forum/dell-mini-9-guides/2707-drivers-dell-inspiron-mini-9-910-a.html)