Windows XP reinstall: Which driver to install 1st

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Prozac1964

Limp Gawd
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Feb 1, 2010
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I'm wondering you do when you reformat a hard drive, install Win Xp, and have to install the needed drivers. What is the very first driver you install? Chipset, Video, Network, etc.

I'm in the middle of a reformat/reinstall myself, but I'm not learned enough to know the priority of driver installation.

What order do you use? :)
 
Network first if you don't have the driver disk. If you do, then chipset, video and the rest.
 
No I don't have the driver disc. This is a friends laptop and he threw it away. I did go online to Dell and download the drivers. I thought I should do the chipset first so I did and it installed perfectly. Then video, and it crashed, even when I forced it to the .inf file in the device manager. Network crashed on install.

In every case it appears the driver wants to work BUT it can't find the hardware associated with it. I wonder if I should reformat it again, and try network driver first. This laptop is from 2005 so finding drivers takes some work. Then I put them on a thumb drive, just to watch them crash.
 
you guys are forgetting something! the service packs!! (but the chipset first then the chipset again then all the rest)
 
andre1992 said:
you guys are forgetting something! the service packs!! (but the chipset first then the chipset again then all the rest)
Click to expand...

I actually did think about the service packs just today. I wonder if SP1, SP2 can be downloaded and put on a USB stick then transferred over from my desktop, to the laptop that is giving me a hard time. ;)
 
Prozac1964 said:
I actually did think about the service packs just today. I wonder if SP1, SP2 can be downloaded and put on a USB stick then transferred over from my desktop, to the laptop that is giving me a hard time. ;)
Click to expand...

http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?id=24


I didn't mention Service Packs because it should be slipstreamed insto the installation media... if it's not, grab that installation and install SP3, and don't forget to update the browser to the latest version (IE 9 for XP?) even if you aren't going to use it. Do the manual browser update so Windows Updates doesn't bring down all the IE updates that you don't need because you're just going to update the browser anyway.
 
If you are going to reinstall, you might as well slipstream SP3, while you are it, you can also slipstream the drivers, although I recommend to put just the network drivers and do the chipset, video, etc by hand.
 
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