I've just been playing with getting Windows 7 running on my m9700 also. My system is a bit... odd. I eventually had a huge band of dead pixels on the built-in screen, and rather than replacing that (out of warranty) or scrapping the whole machine, I decided to make it a "headless" small form factor PC. So, I took the whole case apart and removed the lid/screen entirely, and just use an external monitor.
Anyway, with that setup, I had a terrible time trying to get 32-bit Vista working well. I tried vast quantities of video card drivers to get the SLI 7900 GS cards going, to no avail. A lot of them would work for the 1st boot after installation, and from then on I would get a black screen. This is on an external monitor, as the system is "headless". I eventually gave up.
Then I moved to 64-bit and 32-bit Ubuntu Linux for it. Both require alt-install disc installations to figure out the RAID, if anyone reading this in the future meets that problem. Both can get the machine up and running pretty well, but I'd like to maintain better gaming functionality out of the machine than WiNE can handle.
So I'm now testing it with Windows 7 x64. The install went very smoothly, no problems with the RAID as I encountered with lots of other OS install attempts on this thing. I assumed that the video card drivers would be a tough thing to get going, but the second set that I tried was direct from NVidia (
Welcome to NVIDIA - World Leader in Visual Computing Technologies). From there, Drivers -> GeForce -> GeForce Go 7 Series (notebooks) -> Windows Vista 64-bit -> search. Select the 179.48 beta drivers. They installed without a hitch from the executable, no modding necessary. After restart it asked me if I wanted SLI on, I said yes. Restarted to test and still good, and still working well after many restarts / reconfigs. See if that works for you.
The only other unknown devices in Device Manager were for the chipset, modem, and audio. I should note that when I made the machine headless I took out the Bison webcam, so I dunno about it. I got the chipset working with a download from somewhere, but unfortunately I wasn't careful about paying attention to which of the many sources I used got it going. I don't care about the modem, so I disabled it.
Sound remains a problem, so I'd be interested in hearing what you used to get that up and running, QMaverick!