Is this why I've been a Mac person the last 10 years?

[frayadjacent]

I bought my partner a refurbished Thinkpad for Christmas last year.  He's a tough person to buy for and I thought I'd finally triumphed: now he could play PC games (while I vid!  it was going to be perfect!).  

He played a few games for two or three weeks, then stopped using the computer.  :(

So, this week I decided to commandeer it.  I started by installing a fresh version of Windows 7, taking advantage of my last quarter of student status to get it free from my university.  Installation went fine, but now the damn thing won't connect to the internet.  Apparently there is a problem with a network adapter or a driver or something.  Windows helpfully suggests that, if drivers aren't properly installed, I connect to the internet to see if updates are available.

I've found some instructions but they all involve clicking on various icons or services that don't exist.  Maybe because the driver isn't installed? 

I generally don't take a position on the whole Mac vs Windows thing, mainly cause I'm not that impressed with Macs and I clearly don't know much about PCs, but this is really a bad start.

Comments

[littleheaven]

Yeah, one of the reasons I prefer my mac to my pc is that It. Just. Works.

You probably need to go to your Device Manager and select your network adapter, write down what it is, search the Win7 drivers on another computer, download to a flash drive and then transfer them. I seem to remember having similar issues updating an old PC fro XP to 7.

[frayadjacent]

Thanks for this! This is totally what I needed to do, but it turns the computer is not even recognizing the network adapter, so I don't know what kind it is. :( I'm gonna call the store I bought it from when they open.

[littleheaven]

Wow, how weird. Normally it at least lists it in the device manager with a big yellow question mark beside it. Ah, Windows, how I despise thee. I'm using Win 8 on my vidding laptop, and I've never had to use System Restore so much in my life. Last weekend I ran updates on a few programs, and when it restarted it couldn't find the operating system! I almost reformatted the whole hard drive, before I finally worked out (by fluke) how to access the backup partition from the start menu. Not before I'd spent $40 on a recovery disc I didn't need, though. *sigh*

[frayadjacent]

Oh wow!! Your story beats mine by a long shot. Yeah, the Device Manager had a bunch of devices with the yellow question mark listed, but nothing related to wireless. There was one that said "Unknown Device", so I guess that was it?

Anyway, all over now! :) I was sort of looking forward to using MS Office 2013, which I can also get for free through my school for another ... 2 months? (I don't know if this is a normal thing or if it's because we're in Seattle and 1/4 of our buildings are named for people associated with Microsoft.) I've heard that Office for Windows always works a bit better than Office for Mac, which is pretty much the only kind I've used since ~2003.

[littleheaven]

Can you get the cloud version of Office? I've heard that's pretty good. And, yeah, Office for Mac is not great. I use it at work and it's really slow and you can tell the Mac really doesn't enjoy running it.

What are you using instead? OpenOffice is available for Linux, or I guess Google Docs would do in a pinch.

[frayadjacent]

I probably will just use OpenOffice. The biggest issue is being able to access Word or ppt documents that other people have created. I definitely prefer Word and Powerpoint to their OpenOffice counterparts, but for most purposes I can use a much simpler text editor or, for work, an open-source type-setting system for designed for technical writing. For presentations I'll have to use PPT on my mac or OpenOffice. In either case I'd save them as PDFs at the end anyway.