W7 Now Fully Installed

If you read the previous post you'll know I've been having some fun and games installing W7 64-bit on a clean machine. Last you heard, I was able to start from the beginning (again)...

Well, the short version of the story is that it's now fully installed and operational. After the previous issues seemed to be related to the quality of the drivers for  the Gigabyte motherboard's (the GA-EP35-DS3) SATA ports, I decided to replace the Hitachi 500GB SATAII hard drive with a spare Samsung 160GB PATA drive, hoping that using IDE would be more successful. Sure enough it was, though the build wasn't exactly plain sailing as a couple of blue screens did appear when Windows Update was run for the first time. Compared to the previous attempts however, it was almost a breeze.

So, to get it to work this was what I had to do:

• Use a PATA/IDE drive for the installation.
• Connect the BD-ROM drive to the Gigabyte SATA ports (as I knew I could download the driver from the Gigabyte website).
• Once built and able to log on, I downloaded the Gigabyte drivers for the SATA ports, LAN card and Audio.
• Before installing any other software I ran Windows update to get some application compatibility fixes installed.
• The first time I ran Windows Update, it blue screened while downloading the 8 Important updates. I rebooted and installed them one by one until the compatibility updates were installed and then the final 3 in a single batch.
• Then I downloaded and ran the Intel INF Update Utility to update the Intel chipset (USB and SATA).
• Finally I ran Windows Update again to get the optional updates (graphics card and LAN chip drivers). The graphics card driver installed first time, which was strange as it refused to do so on a previous attempt.

To sum up, it wasn't a pleasant installation experience. As a techie, I refused to let it beat me but 'normal' users may well have given up and installed something else instead. I could have understood it if I was using leading edge hardware but all of the components have been on the market for a year or so.