Tom's Hardware > Forum > Laptops & Notebooks > General Laptops & Notebooks > [Solved] New Laptop: Driver Updates
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Eroge   07-19-2009 at 04:29:59 PM

I'll be buying a laptop in a couple of weeks and I want to be prepared to take care off it well.

Out of the box, it should run fine, but I'm wondering if most people manually seek out and update the Motherboard chipset, graphics, sound, (any other?) drivers?

If so, before or after I run through all the Microsoft Windows Updates?

I'm asking because I wasn't sure if most people update their brand new computers drivers, or only after a reinstallation of the Operating System?

For now until I get some comments, this is the order I was going to do things in. Please give feedback and suggestions!

1) Turn on laptop, set up wireless, download and install AVG anti virus
2) use decrapifier to rid of bloatware
3) Seek out and install an updated chipset driver followed by any others
4) Run Microsoft Windows Update and wait until it finishes
5) Download Firefox
6) Download Spybot S&D but disable teatimer

I'm hoping with this, my laptop will make me proud :D

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Best answer from lostandwandering
For the BIOS, always go to Compaq for, always. Network cards and such generally don't get updated drivers all that often so I would just compare what Compaq has and what the manufacturer has on their site.

As for graphics, I usually just go to either ATI's website or NVidia's site depending on the card (Intel's as well). They are usually far more up to date than whatever the laptop manufacturer has listed.
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Bronze Laptops badge lostandwandering   07-19-2009 at 04:56:40 PM

That should work. About the only two things I look to update regularly are the motherboard's BIOS and graphics card drivers. GPU drivers are important since some releases actually improve performance in some games. It's a pretty good idea to keep up with them.

------------------------------ LAPTOP: Sager NP5760|T7200|2gb DDR2-667| 100gb 7200rpm HDD| 512mb 7950GTX|17'' WUXGA

Desktop: Core2 E7200 | Corsair 2gb DDR2-800 | Gigabyte EP35-DS3L | 250gb Seagate Barracuda | MSI GTX260 (192 SP) | Corsair VX550 | Antec 300 case
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Eroge   07-19-2009 at 07:30:33 PM

So if I end up buying a Compaq, would I be wanting to go to the Compaq site for updated drivers, or would I have to look up each piece of hardware separately, Mother Board, graphics chip, network card (Is the network card covered with MoBo driver in a laptop?) and go to their manufactures sites for the drivers?

Reply to Eroge
Eroge   07-30-2009 at 12:32:31 PM

Still looking for an answer to my question above. =(

Reply to Eroge
Bronze Laptops badge lostandwandering   07-31-2009 at 12:10:06 AM
Best answer

For the BIOS, always go to Compaq for, always. Network cards and such generally don't get updated drivers all that often so I would just compare what Compaq has and what the manufacturer has on their site.

As for graphics, I usually just go to either ATI's website or NVidia's site depending on the card (Intel's as well). They are usually far more up to date than whatever the laptop manufacturer has listed.

------------------------------ LAPTOP: Sager NP5760|T7200|2gb DDR2-667| 100gb 7200rpm HDD| 512mb 7950GTX|17'' WUXGA

Desktop: Core2 E7200 | Corsair 2gb DDR2-800 | Gigabyte EP35-DS3L | 250gb Seagate Barracuda | MSI GTX260 (192 SP) | Corsair VX550 | Antec 300 case
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