The Blog of Steve

Windows 7 x64 on Dell XPS M1210

Well with the end of semester it was time to move on to the latest offering from Microsoft.

With that, it was also time to have a crack at moving onto x64, as the issue (drivers) which prevented me from doing so several years ago on Vista should have now been mostly resolved.

The process was (mostly) very smooth and I am enjoying the OS.

There were a few issues that I did think warranted a mention.

HP HS2300 HDSPA modem. (Sierra MC8775)

The process was as follows:

• Download and the latest driver from HP (Found Here)

• Download the latest driver from Lenovo (Found Here)

• Download and install 7-Zip (found here)

• Install the driver from HP. This driver will not itself but means that once the base USB device from Lenovo is installed, all of the ports and device should be assigned the correct HP driver, making it easy to update them.

• Open the Lenovo driver  with 7-zip and runMC87xx.msi. Once installed, first replace the HP driver for the “USB device” with the one from Lenovo, the other devices should now be discovered, but not actually work. (You will need to manually select the “Sierra Wireless MC8775 Device” driver after pointing Windows to C:\Program Files (x86)\Sierra Wireless\MC8755\AC\Drivers\WinVista\64bit)  The task then it to update each of the newly discovered devices to use the lenovo driver as opposed to the HP driver. (each will need its corresponding driver manually selected from the above location)
• After this, you simply need to install the Wireless Watcher application (Found Here) and you are on your way.

Note on the updated patched driver (2.1.6.0) (Found here).

I also dabbled with an updated version of the driver.  To make it work without hanging, I found that it was necessary to apply to each of the devices with the 2.1.6.0 device, with the USB device LAST. (updating the composite device caused a Blue Screen of Death on swumx12.sys and then BSOD on boot whenever the bluetooth was switched on)

While this driver is newer, the catch is that it unsigned. This is an issue for x64 installations of Win7 for which there is no simple and elegant option for perminantly disabling driver signing enforcement. (Testing mode is an option but I would rather avoid that) One solution does exist which doesn’t depend on Windows itself (so is unlikely to get disabled in the future), Ready Driver Plus (found here) which is basically a macro that will automatically select to disable driver signing on every boot…. Though this can all be avoided by simply sticking with the older, but signed driver.

Dell 355 Bluetooth Module

The latest driver for the Dell 370 Bluetooth module works a treat as an updated driver for the Dell 355. (no modifications required)

Link to driver from Dell

Logitech Webcam

The Vista x64 driver (found here) can be used (though installation itself will fail) by selecting the x64 driver from the directory that the Dell package extracts too before installation.