Detecting drivers and hardware

jasongr · Dec 17, 2004

Greetings,
I'm going to be wiping out my laptop in the next few days and starting fresh, but I want to know what hardware and drivers are on my computer right now.
Is there a way to get them all? Any software for doing this?
Any way to get the default hardware/drivers?

Many thanks and happy hollidays,
Jason
:santa2:

someoneElse · Dec 18, 2004

jasongr said:
Greetings,
I'm going to be wiping out my laptop in the next few days and starting fresh, but I want to know what hardware and drivers are on my computer right now.
Is there a way to get them all? Any software for doing this?
Any way to get the default hardware/drivers?

Many thanks and happy hollidays,
Jason

Try the Belarc Advisor, and Sisoft Sandra. Belarc will be the much lighter and less complicated option.

Then you'll be hunting down all the drivers.

I've found http://www.driverguide.com to be fairly helpful in locating drivers. Except for a few that were listed as external links to sites of companies that no longer exist...

Try User: temp Pass: 512 to browse around if you've never been ther before.

Know Nuttin · Dec 18, 2004

Everest Home Edition is pretty good for telling you info.

You could also just look in device manager to see what hardware windows is telling you that you have. Then it's just a matter of going to the manufacturer's site (usually) and getting the software.

jasongr · Dec 18, 2004

Ouch...there is about 50 drivers.

Is there a way to save all the drivers on a floppy or anything? Going to all the sites and downloading them one by one will take forever.

Also, what would happen if I just wiped out the hd and re-installed windows and didnt install the drivers?

Thanks,
Jason

Know Nuttin · Dec 18, 2004

You don't need that many.

main ones to pay attention to are the network card drivers, video drivers, sound drivers, and motherboard chipset drivers.

Depending on what drivers windows already supports, you may not have network access, which will make getting onto the internet to download drivers impossible.

Welcome to the Forums.

You can post pictures here for us to look at if you're not sure of what drivers to get.

jasongr · Dec 18, 2004

Better yet, is there some sort of site I can go to that will tell me the default drivers for a computer?
Its a IBM thinkpad a21m

Thanks for the welcome

-Jason

Know Nuttin · Dec 18, 2004

Not to sound like a goof but IBM is usually a good place to start

http://www-1.ibm.com/support/docview.wss?rs=0&uid=psg1MIGR-47TUYM&loc=en_US

doesn't look like you need too many. That's a good thing.

jasongr · Dec 18, 2004

After too much cutting and pasting (dont be jealous of my skills), here are all the drivers:
(click)

Thanks,
Jason

Know Nuttin · Dec 18, 2004

for most of those devices, you don't need separate driver downloads.

According to IBM, you really only need to get the IDE drivers, which isn't even really required for XP anyways.

What OS do you plan to install? Forgot to ask that earlier, assumed XP.

jasongr · Dec 19, 2004

Its a rather old laptop, so I'll be installing Windows 98 SE.
I was thinking about going with Mandrake, but I'll do that next.

TUK101 · Dec 20, 2004

If your laptop is an Intel based one then Win98 should have enough drivers built in to get you started. Then you can just download the rest of the drivers that you need off from the IBM website. You can get them now if you like too, it should be rather easy to navigate IBM's website, I used it just last year for an old Aptiva computer that I was repairing.

TUK101 · Dec 20, 2004

Here is a link to get you started. They actually do have one of the easier OEM sites to browse. http://www.ibm.com/products/finder/...ts/finder/us/en/finders&C1=5000002&C2=5000006

Detecting drivers and hardware

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