Upgrading to Win 8,7 from Vista or XP and Drivers Updates

Win 8,7,Vista,XP and Drivers Updates

Today there are many people trying out new operating systems on their machines by doing DIY - kind of installations because of availability of installation setups and free knowledge on youtube. Some people even try down-grading from a higher OS to a lower one like those who have Win.8 taking it back to Win.7.

Many laptops and some PCs made today and since the advent of Win.7, 8 and now Win.10 have a number of specifications that are different from the generation of Win. Vista and XP in the areas of device driver availability.

Most of the new laptops today are either running on Win.8 or Win.10 today. This is making it increasingly difficult to find device drivers if someone switches from Win.8 or 10 to say Win.XP/Win 7/Vista or if one is up-grading from say Win.XP to mainly Win.7/8/10.

Sometimes you can be lucky and find compatible drivers using common driver pack solutions or ready-made drivers on manufacturers sites.
However for many old-laptops its prudent that one leaves the current operating system intact or simply does a check for availability of device drivers before venturing into up-grading/downgrading their OS.

The easiest way to check for device drivers is by running an automatic search on the laptop/PC manufacturer's website by punching in the device model name into one of the common search engines to return a list of suppliers of device drivers.

The other one is to search manually for the drivers on the available search engines like google, yahoo, bing etc.

NOTE:
Always check the device's OS version whether its 32bit or 64bit type. Go to My Computer icon, right click and select properties.

Then also for specific drivers downloaded from sites different from the manufacturer always specify the device i.e. modem, bluetooth, ethernet, touchpad, audio, Graphics, Chipset, USB, etc

During downloading, the internet connection must be superb because if the link fails before the file is fully downloaded, the installation won't work perfectly.

Installation is done the normal way. Open the downloaded file, run it and follow instructions and you are good to go.