Please help the computer idiot

[Tyabann]

This one will require a little bit of explanation. Yaaay.

About three years ago my dad bought me a Toshiba Satellite U300 laptop... it had Vista on it at the time.

Vista sucks, so about... hmm, four months later I got my friend, who's a computing god, to 'upgrade' back to XP. It worked fine for quite a while, until last August, when it crashed so hard it wouldn't get back up again, i.e. the hard drive had become ridiculously corrupted somehow.

So I bought a new hard drive. Five hundred goddamn gigs. Beautiful. I got my friend from earlier to do a fresh install of XP on it.

So here's where the problem comes in.

Friend told me to "go online and install the drivers". Of course, the laptop no longer has a wireless connection, so I apparently had to download them on my PC and use a USB stick to transfer them over that way.

The first problem was that Friend's instructions were so vague that I had problems even finding the damned drivers in the first place, since I, a computer moron, had no clue where to look... so when I finally found them on the manufacturer's website, I was pretty happy... of course, I have to download them all one by one, but...

(Are these even the right ones? )

When I tried installing them on the laptop, only half of them worked... some of them simply wouldn't install and others told me I wasn't allowed to install them... am I doing something terribly wrong here?

I just want my laptop working again... please, could someone tell me in detail what to do?

[Ending]

That's pretty much what I did as a tech.support person when it came to laptops. One of the problems was the fact that big manufacturers like Dell, HP, and Toshiba have several models, so you might have actually downloaded something meant for model U300 LP instead of the U300-whatever.

That was the reason I had to re-download the drivers a few times before I could stash them somewhere safe. Another alternative I used were the original installation CDs, which have the drivers, but they're not that great because usually the drivers are too old.

Other times the drivers had slightly different variations. E.g: a different driver for a 64-bit and 32-bit OS. WinXP uses 32-bit, so if you downloaded 64-bit ones they won't install. Then there are drivers you don't necessarily even need, but are there for downloading just in case. Such as helper applications that don't really bring anything on the table.

[chikorita157]

Just download every driver and unzip them. Then run the driver program. If there isn't a setup program, open the device manager. This can be accessed from the System Properties.

Spoiler for screenshot:

Don't be intimidated... The list of devices are separated according to type.

Once you are in there, click on the corresponding device that is missing a driver and right click. Click "Update Driver" and Choose Browse my computer for driver software. Then locate the directory to the corresponding driver and press next and it should install the drivers.

Another option is to upgrade to Windows 7 which is a improvement over Vista and should install drivers out the box, but I don't know if you really want to spend money on a upgrade version of Windows.

[-KarumA-]

Also if you don't know what card etc. you have you can check it in device manager
to see your graphics card simply open Display Adapters and you'll see the card you have inside

But I must say that the easiest way to install drivers is by using the CD's that you get with the product, just put them in and run the driver install and that is it
in some cases you need to know which one you need ofc but you can check if you don't know in device manager

edit:
Windows 7 is good but even now there are still some bugs and it can be weird to work with
Either one is good, I would stick to XP for at least till XP is out of date or I need a new PC lol

[sa547]

I was wondering if the label on the underside of the notebook was checked on, because there's the more precise model and serial number for it.