Windows 7 Just upgraded to 7, getting started, various probs with optical drives, sound card

AlanMintaka

New Member
Hi Everyone,
I've upgraded from XP Pro SP3 to Win7 Home Premium. I'm just getting started with this upgrade and am new to this forum, so I apologize in advance for any posting gaffes.

The immediate problems so far:

1. Sound - I have a Creative X-Fi Extreme Audio card, which worked OK the first few days after the upgrade. Now I'm getting no sound, (Win7, media file playback, Creative driver sound tests, etc). The Device Manager sees the card and doesn't report any conflicts or other problems.

I think it has something to do with the Windows Audio services not running. The Audio end Audio Endpoint Builder services are set to Automatic all right but I can't start them because the dependencies aren't running. So I checked the dependencies and the ones listed for the audio services are all running, I think. "Plug and Play" was one of the listed dependencies. The service by that name is running and so is the uPnP service. The problem here may be that I haven't correctly identified all "Plug and Play" services that ought to be going.

Another group of services that I think I've verified are those Remote Procedure Calls (RPC) ones. There are 3 that have names sounding close enough, and they're all running. Any ideas on this?

Oh yeah, the Xi-Fi driver and application suite is supposed to be the latest for Win7. However, those are the official drivers and programs. Those of you with some Creative experience know that a lot of driver support for this hardware is maintained unofficially on the Creative Forums. I just haven't figured out where to go on this yet.

2. BD-RW drive support. My drive is the LG Electronics GGW-H20L SATA BluRay player/burner, also back-compatible to DVD+/-RW. This worked OK in XP using Windows-provided drivers and LG firmware. The problem with Win7 is that I can't get the drive to be recognized by the OS. The Device Manager can see it and correctly identify it - the error is "This device cannot start (Code 10)." This translated to no drive letter assigned and no drive visible in Explorer.

LG support suggested a Firmware upgrade and sent me an executable installer, which of course failed because it couldn't see the drive. They also pointed me to the CD-DVD drive troubleshooter in Windows 7. This too failed but returned a few suggested places to look elsewhere. I'm in the process of exploring those, which is how I came here.

So that's where I am at the moment. Does anyone have any idea what might be happening in these two areas, or where I would be better off posting if this isn't the right place?

I've put some of my system specs in my forum profile. Should I also be pasting those in messages like this one, or is the profile the place for that stuff to be?

Thanks for your time and patience,
 
Hi Alan and welcome to the forum.
We have had many posts similar to yours concerning problems after an upgrade. I'm afraid that the solution is almost always to perform a clean install. Microsoft themselves recommend a clean install when upgrading from XP so this is most likely the culprit with your issue.
 
Hi Alan and welcome to the forum.
We have had many posts similar to yours concerning problems after an upgrade. I'm afraid that the solution is almost always to perform a clean install. Microsoft themselves recommend a clean install when upgrading from XP so this is most likely the culprit with your issue.

Hi kemical,
Thanks for the welcome and fast response!

I thought a clean install was what I did the first time around, but now that you mention it, I'm not sure. Per instructions I backed up everything on the XP platform and then selected "Custom Install" for the upgrade. The instructions for upgrades from XP to Win7 made it sound like this was also a "clean install".

However after the installation was complete I noticed that all of my personal documents were still on the system drive and in their original folders (I don't use "My Documents"). I had to re-install my applications sure enough, but the presence of those retained documents made me realize that a format probably had not taken place.

So, it's back to the drawing board on the upgrade. I'm on a spare machine at the moment which is running the Win7 upgrade without too many major problems. Fortunately I can use this as a backup in case the re-install goes sour.

This time around I'll have the advantage of making an extra backup copy of my XP platform via that "Windows.old" folder too.

The immediate problem will be how to orchestrate an upgrade that includes a clean install with a format of the system drive. Since the latter didn't happen when I used "Custom Installation", is there a way to do that without having to pay for a full license? The instructions in the packaging really don't make that too obvious.

Thanks once again for the welcome and response, and for your time in reading this one too!
 
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