Thursday 13 August 2009

Toshiba Tecra S10 T9600 Windows 7 Install 95% Successful – And It’s Fast!

We managed to get Windows 7 Ultimate x64 installed on the laptop with a few hiccups along the way.

We used a USB flash drive (previous blog post) to install the OS on the laptop.

Because we are dealing with a 64bit version of the OS, we are in a bit of a bind for some of the drivers due to Toshiba being behind other laptop manufacturers on using 64bit Windows for their installs.

Fortunately, the laptop’s hardware is shared by other manufacturers so we were able to download the Intel AMT and MEI (firmware vPro management) drivers from Acer’s site and use them to seat the hardware in the OS.

When some of the laptop components failed to install, we needed to manually run the driver update and change the option from searching only on the local machine to searching Windows Update if drivers were not found locally. When we did that, a number of the exclamation marked devices had their drivers found on WU, downloaded, and installed without a problem.

We are stuck on two components that we will need to wait for Toshiba on:

image

Hardware ID: TOS6205

And:

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Hardware ID: TOS620A

One is a Bluetooth device and the other is the Toshiba shock sensor on the hard drive setup.

Other than those two drivers not being available, the laptop screams!

Having the T9600 at 2.8GHz, 4GB of RAM with 2 by 2GB 800MHz sticks placing the memory subsystem in Dual Channel Mode, and a 250GB 7200 RPM SATA hard drive the laptop is fast.

For the price of the Laptop and the time to get things right after installing Windows 7, the setup is well worth the time put in.

We also picked up the extra large 12 cell battery for the unit and it is still kicking along after about 3 hours of battery based usage with 55% battery life remaining.

This is one sweet combination … speed and efficiency will abound with setup! :)

Some of that sweetness has been blogged about here:

Philip Elder
MPECS Inc.
Microsoft Small Business Specialists
Co-Author: SBS 2008 Blueprint Book

*All Mac on SBS posts will not be written on a Mac until we replace our now missing iMac! (previous blog post)

Windows Live Writer

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