Hardware Catalog?

[Sylvus]

My girlfriend's having some troubles with her laptop, so I'm planning on formatting and starting everything over clean. I'm wondering if there's an easy way to get a list of all of her hardware so that finding drivers for everything will be easy. Anyone have any suggestions?

[Boogahz]

Might be able to check the manufacturer's site?

[Sylvus]

I figured that was probably an option, though I'm not sure if she still has her info. I was hoping there would be some way to go into something built into windows or a third party program that would let me export all of them to a text file, or print them out or something.

I suppose if no one knows of anything like that, I can look into checking the manufacturer's website.

[Fash]

Besides video card, sound card, and networking, what kind of problems have you ever had with this?

I think you're worrying too much about nothing, here.

Right click My Computer -> Properties. Hardware tab, device manager. Action -> Print (may need to expand the tree nodes first)

You should always be able to get it up and running with just video/sound/networking, and if there are unidentified components after that, the motherboard manufacturer is the first destination.

[Sylvus]

Fair enough. I've never done it for a computer that I was totally unfamiliar with. I just wanted to make sure I had the right make/model of the sound/video/wireless cards, so I knew I was getting the right drivers. You raise a good point though.

[Boogahz]

Fair enough. I've never done it for a computer that I was totally unfamiliar with. I just wanted to make sure I had the right make/model of the sound/video/wireless cards, so I knew I was getting the right drivers. You raise a good point though.

Does she have a restore disk from when she bought the notebook?

[Kilmoll the Sexy]

A lot of the laptops also have a metric shit ton of add-ons that are on board and will need drivers. Wireless, bluetooth, SD card reader, thumbprint scanner, modem, infrared, hotkey drivers, drivers for hotswapping drives, etc etc that it actually IS a good idea to print out all that info. Quite a bit of it will be on the vendor's web site.

One thing you could do for detailed info is to go to the run line and do "msinfo32" and export all the hardware to text and print it out. It probably as more detail than you need, but then sometimes it is a real bitch figuring out what piece of hardware did not install and shows nothing more than one of those damned yellow "?"s.

[cid]

Belarc will give you that list.


http://belarc.com/free_download.html

[Soreali]

Not sure if you've done this yet or not, but pretty much every manufacturer has the drivers available on their site. Ive had to reformat HPs, Compaq's(now HP), dell, toshiba, gateway etc. All of them have the drivers on the site. Just get the model number and you should be good to go. The thing I always do is to just make sure you DL the networking drivers first, once you install those you can just go to the site right from the laptop and dl/install them.. not a hard process at all really.