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Poco Loco

On Tue, 11 Feb 2014 11:35:15 -0500, wrote:

On Tue, 11 Feb 2014 07:50:12 -0500, Poco Loco
wrote:

On Tue, 11 Feb 2014 02:22:55 -0500, wrote:

Being a "hobbyist" I have a lot of experience with drivers, like
starting with a box of junk parts and trying to find the drivers to
get it going on DOS 6.3 or W/98.
Sometimes I am working backward from the numbers on the chips trying
to figure out if someone beside the maker of the board or card I have
wrote a driver for that chip set. I have had fairly good luck.

As long as it is XP, the drivers are easy to get.

One disturbing thing is those old "free" driver sites like driver
guide make you jump through hoops now and they usually try to get you
to download some spyware laden spam generator ... or worse.
I am getting to the point that I just don't use them and stick with
manufacturer sites, even if it is not the one that made the part I
have. Dell is a fairly good resource because they incorporated so many
different chip sets in their stuff but figuring out which product to
use can be tough if you don't actually have the Dell "magic code
number" in question. It can be quite the detective job sometimes and I
end up with a lot of the wrong drivers,.

A good trick is to image your drive at the first good boot before you
start loading strange drivers. Find the ones that work, then set the
wayback machine to when you did that boot so you don't have the
remnants of weird drivers out there.
I always build a good disk with all the drivers for every machine I
build, then copy it to the D: drive on that machine so next time, it
goes easy. I also started putting a listing of everything I know about
the drivers in the disk box (chip set etc) . I hate looking twice for
the same driver.

Maybe I've been lucky. I've not searched for a driver for at least ten years.

As long as you buy new stuff and you are running a supported OS you
should not have to.
I have done plenty of "hobby" stuff, using junk parts and archaic OS's

I just went to the AMD site to check the drivers for my video card. With minimal info, a driver
check is performed from the web site, the appropriate driver is downloaded, and a double-click
executed the installation program. The program first checks to see if the latest driver is already
installed. Mine was. End of story.