Fresh Window 7 + Dell drivers  

Good Morning,

I have installed windows 7 on a new hard driver. Now I have no drivers. I have visited the Dell website and found all the drivers I need. However, when I download the drivers on to a separate computer, place them on a USB stick and open them on the affected computer. This only opens an application called DriverNavigator. I was under the impression I was downloading drivers. With no internet connection DriverNavigator seems to be useless. I have linked the drivers I have been attempting to use below. Any explanation or assistance would be grateful.

Thanks!

http://driversdownloader.com/downloa...M_ZPE.exe.html

http://driversdownloader.com/downloa...2_A03.EXE.html

http://driversdownloader.com/downloa...F_ZPE.exe.html

I've never heard of "DriverNavigator". It may be legitimate, but it doesn't sound like a Dell program, and I've worked on a huge number of Dell computers over the years.

If you didn't do a factory reinstall of Windows, it is normal for you to have no drivers installed after doing a clean install of Windows. To get your drivers, go directly to the Dell website rather than to "driversdownloader.com".

You should first download and install the network driver, getting this computer online, so that you can then download and install all other drivers directly on this computer, instead of having to use another computer for the downloads.

It sounds like you have malware on your computer, so I suggest you start the entire process over again, from square one:

1. Do a new clean install of Windows 7 onto the new hard drive.
2. Go to the Dell website and get the network driver. (If you have wifi, get both the wifi driver and the Ethernet driver. If you don't have wifi, get only the Ethernet driver.)
3. Install the network driver(s).
(At this point, you will be able to get online with this computer, so you can now use this computer to download the remaining drivers.)
4. Drivers that you will definitely need are the "chipset" driver, the "audio" driver, and the "video" driver (if you are using the onboard video). Go into Device Manager and see which devices have an error indicator by them, to see what other drivers you will need.
5. Go to the Dell website and download all needed drivers from there, not from some other website. Download them to a folder on your hard drive, so that they are available in the future if you ever need them again.
6. Install all of the drivers you downloaded.

Jim is exactly right--you got your "drivers" from the wrong place. Go to support.dell.com, put in your service tag number, and get the drivers directly from Dell.

Those links you posted to driversdownloader.com aren't actually drivers. They're links to download a proprietary "Driver Navigator", an unnecessary go-between that links to the driver from Dell--and possibly also installs adware or malware at the same time. Avoid it and get the drivers directly from Dell.

For instance, note that your first link (the ...zpe.exe one) will download a 2 MB exe file from driversdownloader.com, while the Dell site shows the ...zpe.exe driver is actually 249 MB. From this it should be clear driversdownloader is not giving you the actual driver.

BTW, that ...zpe download isn't actually a driver, it's a Wi-Di application. Not sure if that's what you were trying to get, but it's not a driver. As Jim said, go to Dell and get the drivers for chipset, network, audio, and video. There may appear to be a lot of choices, but look for the ones that are drivers, not applications. Do a clean install, then install those four drivers, and then see what else you might need by checking Device Manager.

Dell has sold Windows 7 computers with Wi-Di functionality. Perhaps his laptop is one of these computers. I wonder if the Wi-Di application he was downloading put Wi-Di drivers on his computer. Or maybe his laptop came with a Wi-Di application which worked with his Wi-Di functionality, and so this was simply a reinstall of that program.

*Wi-Di is short for Wireless Display. It allows you to connect your computer wirelessly to a Wi-Di enabled projector.

or OP can check the Dell Product support downloads page:
http://downloads.dell.com/published/Pages/index.html
and look up the model for his computer and start from there.