7

OEMs have a habit of not letting AMD/ATI release updated drivers specifically for the mobility chipsets, which is particularly unfortunate when you want to be cutting edge with the latest operating system releases. On a good note, the Mobility Modder has been updated to support the Radeon Catalyst 9.2 and 9.3 releases here.

There is also an ongoing discussion on the forums related to Windows 7 support for Catalyst 9.3 of the Mobility Modder. From what I gather so far, is that the tool patches the .MSIs correctly but adds the .INF entries for the previously unsupported chipsets improperly.

Assuming you extracted the ATI drivers to the default location (%HOMEDRIVE%\ATI\SUPPORT\*):

For W7 x64: Run Mobility Modder (the beta mentioned above, not the one from the Download page) on the uncompressed drivers. Search for [ATI.Mfg.NTamd64.6.0] inside %HOMEDRIVE%\SUPPORT\[ATI version]\Driver\Packages\Drivers\Display\LH6A_INF\C7_77072.inf and %HOMEDRIVE%\SUPPORT\[ATI version]\Driver\Packages\Drivers\Display\LH6A_INF\CH_76829.inf, and change all instances to [ATI.Mfg.NTamd64.6.1].

For W7 x86: Run Mobility Modder (the beta mentioned above, not the one from the Download page) on the uncompressed drivers. Search for [ATI.Mfg.NTx86.6.0] inside %HOMEDRIVE%\SUPPORT\[ATI version]\Driver\Packages\Drivers\Display\LH_INF\CL_76828.inf and %HOMEDRIVE%\SUPPORT\[ATI version]\Driver\Packages\Drivers\Display\LH_INF\CW_77071.inf, and change all instances to [ATI.Mfg.NTx86.6.1].

If you are confused by the .INF editing, I've saved my x64 .inf and x86 .inf files. Extract them into the directories mentioned above and allow the originals to be overwritten.

Rerun the ATI setup program and it should offer to upgrade your graphics driver as long as it is one of the supported chipsets. If that doesn't work, you can always try to manually upgrade the driver from inside Device Manager and manually browse to the directory where the .INF files are stored.

Keep in mind - all of this is completely "unsupported" by ATI/AMD and myself, so if you break something, you get to hold both pieces.

I'm mostly posting this to gain feedback whether or not this issue is limited to newer builds of Windows 7 and/or specific to Thinkpads. The behavior is that the internal Bluetooth disappears on post build 7000 of Windows 7, as if you've switched off Bluetooth with the hardware switch.

The workaround I've used and recommended to others so far is to download TPFanControl (and donate), and toggle the Bluetooth hardware directly from inside the TPFanControl GUI.

This is how it looks on my system:


Once toggled, W7 should detect new hardware and your Bluetooth should be detected. It is as if the BIOS/hardware settings are getting mistakenly turned off at some point.

If you perform an upgrade (instead of a clean install) to Windows 7 build 7057, and find yourself facing the error code of 8e5e0645, it can be fixed pretty easily.
Exit out of WLM and delete the %USERPROFILE%\AppData\Local\Microsoft\Windows Live Contacts folder. Simple enough, correct? Unfortunately, I found this out after uninstalling and reinstalling all the Live applications and deleting any WLM related directory in my profile. Little by little, it ended up getting narrowed down to that directory by itself.

For some reason, I've also noticed that Desktop.ini files seem to be sprinkled across the drive when I previously "banned" them from the local drive. A quick cd /D C:\ && del /s desktop.ini fixed that problem. Only do this if you don't care about desktop.ini files, post-upgrade.

Update: Looks like someone beat me to it, and had the same issue and blogged about it too, with regards to WLM. Ditto on the desktop.ini issue. Must be common.

As always, I recommend clean installs, but sometimes I try out the upgrade process to see what breaks.

Last month, while I was at the Exchange 14 airlift, Mark R. and friends held another Springboard virtual roundtable. This time, the focus was on Windows 7. You can see an archived version of the video here and you can also check out the questions and answers that they couldn't get to during the show here.

I was out of town for most of February (3 out of 4 weeks in Seattle, WA or Redmond, WA) with little down time to work on my outside-of-work projects.

On a somewhat related note, I'm now an official Microsoft Springboard Technical Expert Panel (STEP) member. Over 200 people applied, so I'm honored to be one of the chosen. It greatly increases my chances of presenting at TechEd this year too.

I have switched Microsoft MVP groups, due to a creation of a brand new MVP group. I had been originally a "Windows Shell/User" MVP way back when, which was later renamed to "Windows Desktop Experience". Historically, I tend to be all over the map with the product groups and products I focus on. This has resulted in nominations/secondary competencies of Forefront and Office Communications Server.

With that said, I was invited to join the Windows Systems and Performance group, which is focused on my favorite aspect of Windows 7 and Server 2008 R2 - Performance! I'll have some good articles on XPerf coming up pretty soon. We're a much smaller group (around 8 of us) compared to the Desktop Experience group.

My primary job focus is more unified communications (Exchange and Office Communications Server) related lately, so you will most likely see more content in those areas in the upcoming months, to go along with the STEP, Windows Systems and Performance and Windows 7 content.

In the past, ATI would be the one behind NVidia with official device driver support, but lately things seem to be reversed a little bit.
With that note, you can download GeForce 181 drivers for W7 for x86 and x64.