Where are the drivers hidden??? LOL

[Pghpooh]

HI
Thinking of doing a clean install of win 10.
My laptop is 7 plus years old running win 7.
I bought the laptop as a refurbished unit with Win vista installed on it. A month later Dell sent me the disks for win 7 and I upgraded to win 7,
I want to take advantage of the free win 10 upgrade.
But with the unit being older I would feel better if I had all the currently installed drivers in a disk or usb flash and ready to install.
Dell still has all the drivers on line, but I'd still like to have the ones installed on the unit ready to go.
Where are the drivers "hidden" and can I just copy them and install them after the win 10 upgade?

 

[Ketchup]

Drivers that old would most likely be included with Windows 10. But I would try the upgrade route and nake sure your hardware is supported for the new OS.

 

[BonzaiDuck]

HI
Thinking of doing a clean install of win 10.
My laptop is 7 plus years old running win 7.
I bought the laptop as a refurbished unit with Win vista installed on it. A month later Dell sent me the disks for win 7 and I upgraded to win 7,
I want to take advantage of the free win 10 upgrade.
But with the unit being older I would feel better if I had all the currently installed drivers in a disk or usb flash and ready to install.
Dell still has all the drivers on line, but I'd still like to have the ones installed on the unit ready to go.
Where are the drivers "hidden" and can I just copy them and install them after the win 10 upgade?

The laptop is dated. That means that it would be more likely that Windows 10 would have drivers-to-match ready to install -- that is, Windows would install them at Windows-install-time.

This approach has worked well for me with a 2007 Gateway laptop now in a dual-boot configuration with Win7/Win10. First, open Device Manager under Win 7 and make a note of all the devices likely requiring their own drivers. If you have incorrectly installed drivers or devices without drivers, find them and update the system so that the Device Manager shows everything working and configured properly. Then make a list of everything in DM that would require a special driver of its own: sound, network, specialized storage controllers, graphics adapter -- I'm sure you can complete that list.

You should write down the exact specification of the device shown in the DM tree if it is properly installed.

Now, simply install the Win 10 OS, check the device manager tree for yellow nodes or incompletely identified devices. Often you can sort this out to a point that you only need to run a web-search of a precise item or items in your list from the Win 7 configuration, and you should find those drivers. But it would also be at least equally likely that Win 10 would find them via the web.

And it's likely that the Windows 7 driver would work under Windows 10.

If you really want to build the driver collection on a USB flash, you'd still have to hunt them down preferably at the manufacturer's web-site. If your system is listed in an archive on that web-site, it should provide every single hardware driver you need.

 

[nerp]

You might be able to get away with just having the network drivers on a USB stick just in case it can't find them. But I agree with other posters- you might not have to install any drivers at all.

 

[BonzaiDuck]

You might be able to get away with just having the network drivers on a USB stick just in case it can't find them. But I agree with other posters- you might not have to install any drivers at all.

Generally, the OP's strategy is the one I always tried to follow: get all the drivers identified, downloaded and acquired; then put them on a USB stick.

But with old hardware, I'd just seen Windows manage it all pretty well.

 

[Spacehead]

I just heard about this program & it reminded me of this thread.

Double Driver
"When you first run it and do a scan, it'll show you all drivers it detected." Then you can save them

For an overview go here
https://www.grc.com/sn/sn-564.htm
and search for the term "Double Driver" or "Incredible Tip of the Year" as it's near the bottom of the page.

Steve Gibson has it available on his site now.
GRC.com/doubledriver.zip

 

[yinan]

I also love DoubleDriver. It works really well. I use it for extracting and saving all drivers so that they can easily be incorporated into Windows MDT builds.