This can be difficult to answer. You have to know:
- What operating system you have.
- What motherboard you have.
If the particular PCI or other card is compatible to the board.
If you have an older system things can get tough. Mostly I have found very few people have their original restore disk. In this case, if you do ever have to reload your system for any reason, you will need to have a WIN98, WIN-ME (or other system) disk and hope that you have the KEY CODE that came with it. This is the license you need to be “legal”. If you don’t I would suggest to take it to a professional to figure it out. DO NOT use a copy of any operating system for any reason. This can only get you in trouble. It could be defective and carry viruses or worse also.
MOTHER BOARDS
These have been changing at the speed of light. I will not go into all the changes. I don’t have enough room on this web site for that. I will say that most of the newer boards are much much faster and have far different connections for interface cards. PCI express is only one example. The newer boards have integrated LAN cards, Sound, and Graphics and others. Years ago they were all separate cards. Now if you need to find drivers you MUST know what motherboard you have. Here’s how: Look at the board very close. Normally the brand (such as Intel) is stamped on the board along with the model number. You can try going to the board manufacturers web site. See if you can find all the drivers and download them to any computer and put them on a disk. Since you probably do not have any LAN card driver running you may have to use a different computer. I normally load them on a USB drive or in the case of WIN98 or ME I normally cut them to a disk. Why? because the USB drive needs a WIN98 or ME driver to load and work. Yup! Hay! this is some old stuff. If you have Windows XP or later you usually just let it load the driver by itself. Normally the second you plug in the Thumb drive into a USB port on an Windows XP machine it will start loading the driver immediately. Most of the drivers will normally load. If one doesn’t you need to download it from the board manufacturers web site. If it is a major manufacturer such as Dell, Gateway etc. go to their site and download the drivers from there.
TIP
If you have a Dell or any other major manufacturer you go to their site. All the drivers for that particular computer are there. Do NOT go through the pain of finding a separate driver for sound, Video etc. You will wear yourself out. If you added a different Graphics card than originally came with the computer you need to get the driver off the install disk for that card, get it from the web site or try to figure it out by reading the very small writing on the chip that is on the Graphics or other card. In other words: don’t lose your original driver disk. I can’t believe how many people don’t have the disks they need when they need to reload their computer.
Why would I need to reload my computer in the first place?
Although there are more reasons than can be listed here, it is normally because they get really slow. This is normally caused by Viruses, Spy-ware or other nasty things that get in your computer (on your hard drive) over time.
What if I can’t find a driver?
This happens a lot when you have to reload a Windows 98 or ME computer.
Here is were the work comes in. You need to remove the separate PCI (or other) card from your computer. Now get a magnifying glass (seriously) to see the very small numbers on the chip. (picture above) WRITE THEM DOWN. Do not trust your memory and you don’t want to do this over. Now you need to go to a driver site. Here are some of them:
driverguide
driversearch
driveragent
driverheadquarters
mrdriver
and more. Use a search engine if necessary.
Find the driver you need and load it to a disk and then load it on the computer that needs it. If you just can’t make things work you need to find a technician that can help you.
With the introduction of Windows 7 I personally do not support so called older operating systems. These include: Windows 3.x, Windows 95 & 98,Windows ME. Newer computer are hugely faster and far more secure.
