getting dell drivers - overwhelmed :(

unwashed potato!

unwashed potato!

unwashed potato!

Soldato
Joined
12 Feb 2006
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Surrey
i just reinstalled xp on a laptop of mine and as i didn't have a recovery disk or whatever i needed and was in a rush to get things going i used what i beleive is a plain oem copy of xp home and then put my legit key in. all installed fine however i don't have any drivers and therefore lacking a lot of the features, e.g. no dvd drive, sound buttons don't work, no wired internet, the list goes on. trouble i'm having though is on the dell website it's so confusing which drivers i actually need.

my laptop is a latitude x300 and this is the page for the drivers. it's aweful as for network alone there is 22 drivers and none have an explanation of what they do.

anyone able to help me out? i tried software to see what i have that needs drivers but i had to pay so gave up quickly.
 
You'll only need one of the network drivers, the problem is knowing which one. Short of remembering which hardware you have, or having the original driver CD that dell's come with, you'll need to grab them all and just go through trial and error.
I don't think there's a better way, since they'll all just show up in the device manager as 'unknown device' without giving any clues, will they?
 
Change your product and try choosing drivers by service tag rather than model, see if that narrows down the selection.
 
iviv said:
I don't think there's a better way, since they'll all just show up in the device manager as 'unknown device' without giving any clues, will they?
Click to expand...

Here's how to work out what 'unknown devices' actually are.

  1. Open the device manager ( start > run > devmgmt.msc)
  2. Find an unknown device, or one without drivers
  3. Double click on it
  4. Go to the 'details' tab
  5. Change 'property' to 'Hardware IDs'
  6. Shift+select all of the items in the 'value' section and paste them here, or Google lines individually

For example, the first line for my network card is:
PCI\VEN_10EC&DEV_8168&SUBSYS_E0001458&REV_01

If I Google that line I can see it's a "REALTEK RTL8168B/8111B FAMILY PCI-E GIGABIT ETHERNET NIC (NDIS 6.0)".

If that doesn't work you can split the string up more. Take the first few letters after VEN_ until the first &, here mine is 10EC. Paste that here and I can see it's a 'Realtek Semiconductor' card.
 
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