Re: dell drivers and reinstalling the OS

On Mon, 17 Nov 2008 16:59:07 -0600, RnR <> wrote:

>Maybe this will save someone some grief maybe not.
>
>I decided to reinstall my E1405 OS this morning so naturally I saved
>my drivers but also downloaded a new set of drivers just in case from
>dell's web site (logged in with my service tag #). Not sure what
>happened but to make a long story short, I didn't get the bluetooth
>driver I originally had, from Dell's site nor did it get saved as part
>of my saved driver set.

When you save your drivers, where do they come from? I'm going to install XP on another hard disk
and I'm kind of wondering if downloaded all of the right ones from the Dell site.

>Not sure why all this happened tho in
>retrospect I could have gone to my backup or maybe the orig. laptop cd
>(assuming it has drivers). The only reason I knew I was missing the
>bluetooth drivers was because I didn't see the icon as I did before.
>Not sure why that when I did a new hardware check, it didn't see my
>bluetooth 355 card either. I found the driver elsewhere on line and
>installed it and all is well now.
>
>But the point of this story is you better have a backup and / or have
>a "complete" set of drivers before you reinstall your OS. And if it
>matters I checked my old invoice and the bluetooth was already a part
>of the laptop purchased from Dell's outlet store about 2 years ago.
>Just beware !!!
>
>
>ps-- odd thing is I changed my daughter's laptop over from vista to
>xp a week or so ago and that was also purchased from the outlet store
>with no problems with regard to drivers. Her system runs better than
>this laptop with a slightly slower cpu. I'd trade laptops but I don't
>want a pink laptop (someone might think I'm a girly man <g>).

DaveJohnson12@nomail. wrote:
> When you save your drivers, where do they come from? I'm going to install XP on another hard disk
> and I'm kind of wondering if downloaded all of the right ones from the Dell site.

You know, sometimes the Recovery method for your make and model contains
an error and may include older or the wrong drivers. And the same could
be true for the manufacturer's webpage. Although the latter they might
be newer which is okay most of the time. But sometimes newer can break
things too.

But what always works is grabbing the drivers from your OS. You can do
this manually, or with software which makes this easy. Here is one that
is free and is non-commercial.

DriverBackup! (free)
http://sourceforge.net/projects/drvback/

--
Bill
Asus EEE PC 8GB 1GB SoDIMM Adata 16GB
Windows XP SP2 and Xandros Linux

On Tue, 18 Nov 2008 19:48:02 -0600, BillW50 <> wrote:

>DaveJohnson12@nomail. wrote:
>> When you save your drivers, where do they come from? I'm going to install XP on another hard disk
>> and I'm kind of wondering if downloaded all of the right ones from the Dell site.
>
>You know, sometimes the Recovery method for your make and model contains
>an error and may include older or the wrong drivers. And the same could
>be true for the manufacturer's webpage. Although the latter they might
>be newer which is okay most of the time. But sometimes newer can break
>things too.
>
>But what always works is grabbing the drivers from your OS. You can do
>this manually, or with software which makes this easy. Here is one that
>is free and is non-commercial.
>
>DriverBackup! (free)
>http://sourceforge.net/projects/drvback/

Thanks for the suggestions. I think I'd like to do it manually if possible. I don't want to trust
software that could make a mistake. I like most things I've tried from sourceforge.