for those that own a dell laptop and i need to reinstall windows no driver/mobo disk

whiteoxe

Hi,
Ive never been game to format and use my Win 7 install on my Dell Latitude laptop. Today i went to Dell site and allowed them to analyse my laptop for drivers. It came back no drivers needed.

So can i format/install win 7 then go to the Dell site and have the drivers installed, like for sound and wifi, video card etc ? I just dont want to instal widows and find ive got no needed driver.

Actually will Win 7 allow the wifi to even work or does that require a driver from Dell. My Ethernet cable seems to be faulty so i cant plug that into the router/modem. Thanks for your advice.

bomber

whiteoxe,
The question is kinda confusing, but I think I know what you are getting at. So you are installing windows on the laptop, and are worried about it not having any essential drivers. Motherboard-specific drivers are handled automatically, and things like wi-fi and graphics cards will be downloaded automatically. It is almost essential to have your computer connected to an Ethernet hard-line during the install process. Drivers for core things like GPU, wifi, ectc will be installed during the initial install, and windows update will take care of others in a few batches after the initial install is complete. Additionally, some drivers can be downloaded directly from the device manufacturer if needed.

RDL2004

Ive never been game to format and use my Win 7 install on my Dell Latitude laptop...
... So can i format/install win 7 then go to the Dell site and have the drivers installed, like for sound and wifi, video card etc ?

Do you already have Windows 7 on the laptop?

potatohead

I suggest you spend a little bit of money and buy a second system disk. Take the one you have right now out of the machine, and put the new one in.

Proceed to install Windows 7.

Dell is very likely telling you that 7 has all the drivers you need built into the OS. That is one of the killer things about 7. It really does have a ton of drivers built in! Dell is likely right, but maybe not.

The maybe not part is why you are going to get another disk. If you find out one is missing, say the network one, you boot with the old disk, do your search work, get the driver, put it onto a USB, CD, whatever you've got, boot the other disk and install it. Repeat this until 7 is running great.

Then you can take your old disk, get data off of it, maybe programs, whatever, and I would just put it in storage. You can always boot it quickly if you need to.

I do this kind of thing on every laptop I've had. All I use now are laptops and they often come with recovery partitions, secret files that can reproduce a factory installation disk set, and other things needed to recover from a hard system crash or problem. Either I clone that disk, so that the new one I buy, or that SSD, can be started up factory correct, or I just archive the disk, just in case, and I install something I want to run on the computer onto the new disk.

Disks are cheap, your time and pain associated with trying to make moves like this on one disk only might be more expensive.

PJAllen

So much for canging from windows to linux permantly then?

jazzed

PJ Allen wrote: »

So much for canging from windows to linux permantly then?

Predictable outcome. VirtualBox is free ;-)

whiteoxe

PJ Allen wrote: »

So much for changing from windows to linux permanently then?

A thousand comedians outa work and and you wanta be one PJ ? Just kidding ! I have a few things prop IDE , bs2 editor, couple of Scribbler PROGRAMS, whoops caps.... other stuff not much. it can all work under Linux Wine or virtualbox when i get it ironed out. I use this laptop much less than desktop.

thank you everyone for the help. i will get another Ethernet cable and maybe another drive, sincerely mike.