Clean install and no yellow marks on device manager. Why?

[full_on1]

Hello.
I did a fresh clean install of Windows 10 in an Envy 17 notebook. After rebooting a couple of times, but before installing any HP drivers, I found that the Device Manager did not present any yellow question marks, unlike it used to do in my past win 7 installations.

Looks like Win 10 recognize all my hardware, apparently even the Nvidia control panel is installed.

Why is that?
This means I don't have to install the drivers I download from the HP site before deleting the previous Win 10 installation?


Are these drivers as good as the ones from HP?


Thank you.

 

[Billb2]

Usually the latest drivers are the best.
And yes, Win 10 does a much better job than previous OSs with everything except legacy hardware.

 

[JimmiG]

Windows will usually pull all the drivers it needs from Windows Update. Often they're even more recent than the drivers you can find on the manufacturer's homepage.

Unless you need extra control panel options etc., the automatically installed drivers are fine.

 

[nerp]

The drivers that MS installs are WHQL, which means they are actually provided by the manufacturers and tested for quality and stability. This is why you might not get a newer version of a graphics card driver right away through WU and it might be a version or two behind what you can download from AMD or NVIDIA.

In many cases, the WHQL driver is preferable to the one you download from the manufacturer for a variety of reasons. I can think of some peripherals that come with bundled crapware and resource-hogging tools, tray icons, and more.

If you have everything working correctly and no drivers are missing, you pretty much are all set.

For laptops, there might be things you will need to grab for full functionality. Things like hotkeys, on-screen-display of special key functions, unique power management features. A ThinkPad, for example, might need the Lenovo Power Management driver and the Lenovo Settings Dependency driver installed to take advantage of every feature with the system and maximize battery life, etc.

 

[BonzaiDuck]

I, too, had noticed this regarding my C2D Penryn laptop.

To some limited extent, the older hardware with a newer OS should give these sorts of results, or just fall short. I had two problems, or thought I did: the first was a yellow-bang that popped up under a "Storage Controller" node, when all the storage drivers should fall under the "AHCI controllers" node. The second was a "communications" device with a yellow bang. The latter problem was easy to resolve: apparently there IS an embedded driver for the device in Windows 7 and 10, but you have to pick it from a list, and the only way to do that is to know precisely the name and model of the component -- which -- luckily -- I had.

I'm glad I didn't spend an extraordinary amount of time tracing down the problem for the storage-controller indication. Somehow, by luck, I came across some advisory or comment in a web-tips page, noting that some laptops (particularly this one) had "docking stations" with additional storage. The lappy had an SATA-II controller and another "multi-device" controller which was really IDE and split into two parts. It is necessary because the optical drive connects to it. And the advice was clear: "disable the second storage controller node" in Device Manager.

With this old laptop -- a rather grand and large executive-style unit with the docking station option -- those who received them for their work with the docking station had problems. They didn't follow the usual cautions for unhinging or replacing the lappie to the docking station, and they'd develop hardware problems.

And I'm glad I didn't seek out the docking station as a surplus item so I could use it. Just as well off to use a USB external drive. If you ask me, the notion of "docking stations" came and went. Gateway apparently thought people wanted the best of both mobile and desktop worlds. And maybe the HDDs included in the laptop were initially so limited in size, they thought the docking idea was a good one.

 

[full_on1]

Thanks for the very informative replies. Sounds like it is safe to leave things as they are, at least for now.

 

[Ketchup]

Every new version of Windows adds drivers for hardware they have verified since the last OS. and nukes support for hardware that is no longer supported. Windows 10 has tweaked this a little, but not much, from previous versions.

 

[SimMike2]

When Windows 7 first came out many people experienced the same thing. The older the OS, the more stuff that needs drivers.