At work we've just purchased some brand new Stone netbooks with touch screen technology. They are pretty clever little things, based on the Fizzbook Spin, but for our needs have one flaw in that they come with Windows 7 Starter and we need them to work within a domain. Fortunately we have a volume license agreement so we could put Windows 7 Professional on them.
All went happy and well with the install, until I checked the drivers list in Device Manager. There were several devices that Windows 7 couldn't detect, including the graphics card, audio card, network card and a few unknown devices. I downloaded all of the drivers from Stone's website but I still have left 4 unknown devices, all windows ACPI devices. Despite all my efforts locating drivers or even working out what the devices were, I couldn't not find any suitable drivers.
I was near to giving up when an idea popped into my head; what if I took the files from C:\Windows\System32\Drivers and tried to install those? Unfortunately I discovered that the files in this directory are .sys files that cannot be installed. However, this turned up a useful fact: It's the .inf files that are used to install the drivers and Windows Vista and Windows 7 keep a store of all driver files before they are installed!
The location for this files is C:\Windows\System32\DriverStore and you can use these files to install drivers for all devices installed in the system. Luckily for me we ordered several of these Stone netbooks so I just booted one of them up, located the driver store and copied all the relevant drivers across. Turns out that the ones I was missing were OEM installed drivers for the touch screen and anti-shock technology.
My thanks go to Vijay at msigeek.com for his incredibly helpful article.
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