Windows 7: this is stupid :/ how to know which one?

Hello. i was installing drivers to my acer aspire 5738G from acer website, the stupid thing is - there is bunch of drivers for my model, for the same one wlan adapter.. and u know what, all these drivers work! how to know witch one is really for my hardware? Because after installing driver, in device manager the hardware automaticly changes name to drivers name. i have no idea what is real hardware brand then...



its same with touchpad... there is listed 2 touchpad drivers. one is synaptics, another one is ALPS, they both work on my hardware, but since they just 2, was easy to find out that ALPS works not so smooch as synaptics. they also give 3 diff brand drivers for modem... the the biggest head hurting is this wifi bunch of drivers? how to know witch one of them is best for me? O.o

Yes it can be daunting at times knowing which to choose, Dell have a service tag on their laptops ,you just enter the tag and it will identify which drivers are right for your laptop, Have'nt had a look at Acers website to see if they do a similar thing but if they do I would suggest going down that route, the synaptics driver is the best one to choose as regards the wifi is the card in the laptop easy to access to have a look to see the manufacturer?

what u mean "service tag"? and yah.. i wil take apart laptop tomorow to clean dust, but i have no idea or i will see wlan chip. maybe u know where i could find out how to open my aspire right to get to the cooler? when i had HP, i found out how to take laptop apart by the PDF file, witch one i found on them website, but there is no such information on acers website. thanx for reply

you can run a system information utility, such as SPECCY to identify all your hardware. if you look in the BIOS column of your screenshot, there are four different chip makers listed. once you identify the chip maker, you will know which driver to download. since there are three intel drivers, you would then look at the driver version number. the one with the highest number is the latest release. in your screenshot, two of the drivers are identical (version number, and file size), but were released about a month apart. the only difference is one is called "condor/peak". but most likely, either one of those drivers would work on the same chip.

Ty for the speccy, but it cant show unknown hardware... unless its installed with driver. anyway, it gives verry basic info. u should try everest home edition, or ultimate edition for detailed pc info. I find out my wlan, its intel, but now i have another problem. i installed all the drivers from acer website, and one device left as unknown. windows cant find driver neither on internet. any ideas?

try this: Hardware Identification

ty, but this device don't have vendor id or anything... i also did try driver agent and driver max, they don't detected as hardware with missing driver...

The service tag is a sticker at the bottom of the laptop with the serial number and model number.
It will probably look like this

Service Tag is a Dell thing. Its listed in the BIOS and usually on a sticker on the PC. You then go to the Dell support page, type in your service tag number, and the web site takes you to a page specific to your model Dell. It makes it easy to get the correct drivers and documents for your PC. Acer may or may not have an equivalent system, I don't know. In any case it won't hurt to look at the various stickers and get as much info as you can to help you find the correct drivers on the Acer web site.

Hello, I have also recently bought an Acer laptop and ran into the same problem. On their website, you can register your laptop using the serial number (found written on a sticker on the bottom of the laptop OR written in BIOS). After you register it you can find information on your product. If the information is not enough, you can always ask technical support. They will provide you with links to what you need. Cheers