Windows 7: The Missing Manual

Chapter 18. Hardware

A PC contains several pounds of wires, slots, cards, and chips—enough hardware to open a True Value store. Fortunately, you don’t have to worry about making all your PC’s preinstalled components work together. In theory, at least, the PC maker did that part for you. (Unless you built the machine yourself, that is. In that case, best of luck.)

But adding new gear to your computer is another story. For the power user, hard drives, flash drives, cameras, printers, scanners, network cards, video cards, keyboards, monitors, game controllers, palmtop cradles, and other accessories all make life worth living. When you introduce a new piece of equipment to the PC, you must hook it up and install its driver, the software that lets a new gadget talk to the rest of the PC.

UP TO SPEED: The Master Compatibility List

Remember that Windows 7 is another leap ahead in the evolution of the operating system. Discovering that a piece of your existing equipment is now flaky or nonfunctional is par for the course.

If you’d like to eliminate every glitch and every shred of troubleshooting inconvenience, limit your add-on gear to products that pass the test—the one administered by the Windows 7 Upgrade Advisor. That’s a little program you can download from this Web site:

www.microsoft.com/windows/windows-7/get/upgrade-advisor.aspx

Even if your computer uses Windows Vista—which means it’s probably fine for Windows 7—running the Upgrade Advisor is a good idea. If you plan to upgrade to Windows ...