For anyone who is running the Win7 RC, are you running into any unexpected problems with regards to hardware incompatibility? If so, have you been able to work through them in what you would call a reasonable fashion? Any big name things out there that are breaking with Win7?
EDIT: Make that devices AND drivers per David Collantes' answer.
EDIT 2: Would like some special attention to items that worked great under Vista that now are not-so-great under Win7.
Running Windows 7 on four machines. All four are DELL, so I can only give feedback on their hardware. So far, no problems at all with hardware incompatibility with DELL XPS 360, Optiplex 755, GX620, or Latitude D630.
As normal, drivers are a different story. I had had problems with NVIDIA video drivers (crashes here and there), although the latest beta has being quite stable for a couple of weeks now.
I am running Windows 7 RC1 x64 on both my laptop as personal desktop and am pretty happy with it.
Personal Desktop: Dell XPS 420
No issues whatsoever.
Laptop: Dell XPS M1530
No issues except the recent issue I had connecting to network shares in the office. Also, the Intel 3945abg wireless has problems correctly waking up from hibernation; often the only way to get it to work is to disable / enable it entirely. This problem also occurred using Vista, though.
I just installed it on my HTPC and did not have any problems other than MKV playback locked the system up to the point of a hard boot.
I ran the Windows 7 Upgrade Advisor Beta first and it did not find any problems.
I'm still running W7 Beta but will move to the RC soon. It's a really old machine, with an nForce 2 chipset, which as all nForce 2 owners know, was tossed to the curb in Vista; there are no Vista drivers for nForce 2 chipsets, meaning it's a "driver orphan".
Here's a dirty little secret for you:
I've got it working using old drivers for Windows XP and 2000.
This is hardly an optimal solution, and is of course fraught with peril. However, I have not had a single crash in the entire time, and with the exception of some display artifacting (the video card is AGP FX5200, also a driver orphan) has worked like a champ.
Microsoft would really, really like it if you upgrade your hardware to something that has "newer" drivers. However, the old drivers work just as well, and if those drivers were stable to begin with, you can get by with them in a pinch.
I installed Windows 7 RC x86 on an old Dell Optiplex GX270 -- 2.6 GHz Pentium 4, 512MB RAM, 40GD Hard Drive with an older Intel chipset.
Windows 7 does install and run acceptably on this older machine with only 512MB of RAM.
I did have some issues getting the video card drivers installed. It has an older Intel 865G which is not supported in Vista. After the OS install, the video card came up as 'Standard VGA'. I did get the older XP drivers from the Intel site and then ran the install under XP SP3 compatibility (the install program was checking windows versions...) Since this driver works through XPDM and not WDDM, Glass is disabled. However, rendering is much faster with the old Intel driver than with the Standard VGA driver.
Any drivers that work in Vista should in theory work in Windows 7 due to them both running the same kernel.
The only problem I have while running 7 is with my onboard sound chip. The drivers for the Realtek HD Audio (Realtek ALC889A codec) contain a management application that can only be installed under WinXP. Without this app you cannot set the levels for sound input (microphone, line in). The windows integrated mixer does not show the controls for these two, so I have to live without sound input.
I installed Win7 on my Compaq Presario 2145 laptop, which is pretty old, and it didn't work at all.
The laptop has: Athlon 2400, 768 MB RAM, 60 GB HDD, 512 MB video. Bought it in 2003.
When you start it up, it jams before it even gets to the windows loading screen. Just sits at an eternal screen of blackness.
I think the minimum requirements say 1 GB of RAM is needed, but I'm not sure that is the issue. The laptop has some older hardware in it of course, so I'm sure that is part of the problem.