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Question

Upgrade question (saving a particular file)

Sep 23, 2012 9:28AM PDT

Hi all. I propose upgrading from Vista to Win 7 on my HP Pavilion dv6500 Laptop. I discussed this with a techi some time back an his experience was that it was a fairly straight foreward process on an HP laptop (ie specificaly easier to do on the HP laptops). His one recomendation was to save a file from the Windows folder containing drivers prior to doing the upgrade in case the new Win7 files didn't have the correct drivers for the software I have. Trouble is, I'm not sure of the name of the exact file that he recomended saving to USB flash drive to cover this contingency, nor it's location within Windows. Can anyone recall which file in Windows folder he was talking about. (nb. I do have it written down in a 'safe place', but it's so 'safe' I can't find it.Wink

Discussion is locked

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Answer
The problem is
Sep 23, 2012 10:52AM PDT

The problem is, simply saving the driver file isn't enough, so my guess is that this person is far less technical than you would like to think. Just go to the website of the various manufacturers of any hardware devices you have, download the Windows 7 driver packages, and stop making things needlessly complicated.

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Well, not quite . . .
Sep 23, 2012 7:02PM PDT

The 'Techi' was a Microsoft tutorial type guy. Plenty of credibility ! The recomendation was to try and avoid the need to go to all the various software manufacturers, thus simplifying the whole process.

But I still need to know where the file is, so I can copy it to USB flash drive.

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Bad news I fear.
Sep 24, 2012 1:46AM PDT

The driver "file" is just one part of many things the driver needs. You've been lead astray by this Microsoft tutorial guy so here it is again,

The file they likely are referring to is the file you downloaded then ran to install. After the install, the files it installed are not enough for even a Microsoft Tutorial guy to get the device working.

Bob