Drivers

The_Seal

I was wondering do the windows automatic updates, also update your systems drivers.

I just recently formated my laptop and reinstalled windows. I installed Windows Vista x64 which is the OS my laptop came with. And everything seems to be working ok. On my old laptop i would then install the driver disk that came with the laptop. Nothing came with this laptop. Its a HP so i just made a recovery disk and used this to re-install windows.

So basically im saying do i need to go looking for drivers or does my system ok now

seamus

Since Windows XP, the install disc would usually contain drivers for about 90% of the normal devices that would be in your computer. Vista probably has a few more. But the Windows installer tends to have stripped-down or out of date device drivers.
The driver disc that you get with your hardware usually has extra utilities for managing the hardware, which you don't get in the Windows install. Often Windows will use a generic driver instead of a manufacturer-specific one. So while your hardware will work, you might not get 100% out of it.
But this is usually only a big deal for GFX cards and CPUs, not so much for anything else.

If everything works and works correctly, I would say not to worry about it. Automatic Updates will includes device drivers, but not all that often.

The_Seal

Yea i was wondering because my touch screen isnt working the same as it was before, a few things are missing.

I was on the HP website and enter my laptop details. I assumed there would be one driver for each component like an audio driver, video driver etc. . . but there are almost 40 drviers here should i download and install them all, several under the same heading like Network which has 5 files.

Sorry if they sound like stupid questions its better to ask then mess something up

seamus

Yeah, it can be tough to tell. I would have though that someone like HP would have some overall "roundup" software which will automatically detect the correct drivers for your machine and install them.

You'll need to find out what version of each component your machine has (audio, video, display, etc) and then download the correct driver from HP for that.

It's actually quite tough to do any damage unless you're really determined. Windows (or the driver itself) will usually tell you when a driver is not suitable/compatible for your hardware.

The_Seal

Thanks for the help ill give it a stab tonight

Anti

If you enter yoru serial number into the HP site you shoudl eb able to get a list of only the drivers for your particular model.