Microsoft had rolled out public testing of Release Candidate of Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 R2 yesterday. I believe lots of people had tasted the new version of Windows 7 by now, and some might have loaded RC for the next minor update for Windows Server.

Fast, super fast, is the first impression I got from what is natively called Windows 7 Server in Microsoft. Everything runs so fast that makes me wonder if some of my hardware got overclocked.

However, there is a minor issue that is a little annoying, but could be well understood. That is there is no out-of-box driver for graphic cards. Not any kind.

Found online an explanation for this from a Microsoft employee, who claimed this a design feature…gosh, another design feature…intending to ensure 100% compatibility and stability for the server.

Truly, a server usually ignores the graphic part seriously, and there is really no need of great horsepower in dealing with graphics for any server.

Fortunately, there is a much bigger driver library online, Microsoft Update Catalog, where every Microsoft tested WHQL hardware driver resides.

Go to http://catalog.update.microsoft.com/v7/site/Install.aspx to install the necessary ActiveX add-on.

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Enter the hardware type, and you’ll find a lot drivers.

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Select to download.

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The downloaded driver pack is compressed by CAB, a Microsoft native solution for compression. Every Microsoft OS supports CAB natively, so that we can extract all the files within the driver pack.

Install the driver manually, and you can have gorgeous graphics again.

Some note: some found drivers couldn’t be installed, like ATI HD2600 PRO on my machine. Had to go for AMD provided super slow driver download…