Install Windows 7 on Samsung Q45 laptop

Install Windows 7 on Samsung Q45 laptop

Win­dows 7 on Sam­sung Q45: Utopia?

I have bought this nice lap­top about two years ago. And when Win­dows 7 came to a final­ized state, I wished to replace my ane­mia Vista by this new sys­tem from Red­mond. The instal­la­tion ran like a charm; and every­thing seemed to work prop­erly; till i try the func­tion keys. I real­ized that abso­lutly no func­tion keys were work­ing. And for a lap­top, it’s deadly to not be able to adjust sound level and, even worse, the screen bright­ness. So it became a ‘sticky’ lap­top for a while on my desk­top, untill i found a way to install all proper dri­vers and all nec­es­sary Sam­sung soft­ware to return my lap­top to a travel usage. Sam­sung ded­i­cated soft­ware I looked for any soft­ware com­pat­i­ble Win­dows 7 on the Sam­sung sup­port web site. Of course, there are not! My model is too old (at least for mar­ket­ing) to get some upgrade. So, I turned to other new mod­els sup­port­ing Win­dows 7, and selected the Q320 (the higher Qxxx model avail­able to this date). I selected some Sam­sung soft­ware that I need (I zapped oth­ers as they have actu­ally minor inter­est to me).

As these new pack­age are ded­i­cated to Win­dows 7, you don’t have to use the famous “Vista SP2 com­pat­i­bil­ity on setup.exe” tip to make it run prop­er­lly. So, once installed, and one reboot later; I was pleased to see the sound, net­work func­tions keys per­fectly work­ing. All but bright­ness :(. What’s the heck with this func­tion? Damn, It was too easy. Then, I tried to check the Intel VGA dri­ver, and install the lat­est release…for noth­ing :(. I’ve tried sev­eral minors release with­out suc­cess. I spent many times on search­ing thru blogs and doc­u­men­ta­tions untill i read this:

The ACPI layer

Win­dows sup­ports two ways to inte­grate bright­ness con­trol: Win­dows Dis­play Dri­ver Model (WDDM) mini­port device dri­ver inter­faces (DDIs) and Advanced Con­fig­u­ra­tion and Power Inter­face (ACPI) firmware con­trol meth­ods. ACPI con­trol meth­ods are the pre­ferred imple­men­ta­tion solu­tion for new platforms.

The ACPI layer is a new to Win­dows 7. Hum…maybe the new Intel VGA dri­ver use the ACPI pro­to­col, and no more the WDDM? I have to look back­ward for a pre­vi­ous branch release of the video driver.

The Intel VGA Dri­ver masked avanger!

So, the last issue is to find the right dri­ver com­pat­i­ble with my moth­er­board AND the sam­sung EDM. Unfor­tu­natly, the 8.15 branch release of VGA dri­ver doesn’t work sup­port WDDM any­more on this moth­er­board? I gave a try to the the v7.14 branch. I’ve down­loaded and installed the higher ver­sion of the 7.14 branch.

One reboot later (see below for details), Bingo !!!. It finally works, at the end :).

NOTE: I had dif­fi­cul­ties to remove the v8.15 video dri­ver release. To do so, firstly, I’ve unin­stalled the dri­ver first, but not rebooted yet! Sec­ondly, I’ve installed the v7.14 release before reboot­ing. And that way, I made it!

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