Compuvision

Hopefully, you have been able to wait this long to install your hardware device drivers.  If you had to install some of them before this point, that's okay - just install the rest of them now.

Actually, this only applies if you have a ThinkPad (or ThinkCenter) from either IBM or Lenovo.  I need to see what this program is properly called.  Once you install the first program, it checks your system and will allow you to automatically download all of the Lenovo-specific drivers and other programs.

Of course, it's always best to have hardware that is natively recognized by Windows.  You will have enough problems, you don't need to make things worse by trying to save a dollar or two by buying non-standard hardware.  It's great that my 1999 HP Laserjets are natively supported by Windows 7.  On the other hand, I had to replace a perfectly good scanner, network card and sound card to get the same functionality with Windows 7 because they were "orphaned" by their manufacturers and they weren't important enough for Microsoft to create Windows 7 drivers for.  My new scanner is an Epson Workforce 520 All-In-One, which seems great but requires all sorts of drivers and support programs from Epson on each computer that needs to use it.

Depending what drivers are needed, you may need to install them even earlier in the installation process.  I have two comparable wireless keyboard/mouse combos from around 2003.  (If I was buying them today, I'd pay a little extra and get Bluetooth devices.)  The Microsoft one works as soon as it's plugged in.  Some people think that the Logitech one looks a little better and has a zoom wheel on the keyboard, in additon to the standard scroll wheel on the mouse.  Unfortunately, it needs extra drivers, so I still need a regular corded keyboard and mouse around whenever I'm setting up a computer that's going to use it.

It's great that the Silicon Image 3114 chip finally allows us to get RAID 5 controllers for less than $40.  I have one.  The only way to know if a drive fails (before your computer just stops working) is by installing their monitoring software.  For no good reason at all, their monitoring software requires Java!  It gets worse.  It won't run "as is" with UAC turned on.  Isn't that great - they force you to add one of the worst security risks out there to your machine and then force you to turn off one of Windows 7 primary built-in security systems!  Two things can be done to mitigate problems:

1 - Disable Java in all of your browsers.
2 - If you take ownership of the "...\Silicon Image\3124-W-I32-R SATARAID5\logs" directory
     (or just the "...\AppLock" file) and give yourself full control over it, you can turn UAC back on.