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General discussion

Finding drivers and ports

Mar 16, 2004 10:14PM PST

hello I recently formatted my sis puter and installed WinME. Everything went smooth but it did not find the PCI card and did not find all the ports IE printer& com. I cannot add modem which was there before but now cannot find. I have tried everything I know any suggestions? this is a gateway 500

Discussion is locked

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Re:Finding drivers and ports
Mar 16, 2004 10:50PM PST

If your machine is "stock" from Gateway, look to gateway.com to fetch drivers.

Remember that Microsoft doesn't supply drivers so you have to do the work.

Bob

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Re:Re:Finding drivers and ports
Mar 16, 2004 11:37PM PST

I did that but what driver should I look for that would be for the ports or Pci card?

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Re:Re:Re:Finding drivers and ports
Mar 17, 2004 12:08AM PST

"I did that but what driver should I look for that would be for the ports or Pci card?"

Actually, I would be looking for drivers in this order and install in that order...

1. Motherboard drivers.
2. USB drivers (not all boards have such. http://www.usbman.com has deep information on USB.)
3. Video/audio, then printer drivers.
Optionally at this point updates to DirectX, IE and other items.
4. Modem drivers.

The "port" you write about is in itself much too vague to discuss. Whereas the PCI Card usually is just a modem that its driver hasn't been installed.

Bob

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Just some questions.
Mar 17, 2004 12:01AM PST

1. There should be a driver for the modem, and it should be on gateway site. Parallel and serial port are driverless, indeed. PCI card: what kind of PCI card? It plugs in a PCI-slot, no doubt, but what is it supposed to do? That's where the driver comes in.

2. What does the BIOS say about the serial and parallel ports?

3. Boot into DOS, connect a printer to the parallel port, and copy a printable file to lpt: or lpt1:. What happens? Printing, error message?

4. What do you plan to use the serial port for? Serial mouse maybe? Does it work in safe mode?

5. New hardware wizard in Config Panel doesn't find anything, I suppose?

6. Why did you reformat? Did it have anything to do with failing ports, PCI-cards or modems?

7. Does Gateway provide a recovery CD (to the original state of the machine)? If so, are the missing devices to be found after installing that?

Kees