A reformat may be possible

ignatzatsonic said:

julio99 said:

I have all non-microsoft drivers backed up with Double driver. I will have to check for the LAN driver but as I am running my laptop plugged in ethernet wouldn't it be backed up as one of the last ones scanned. Whatever the case I will back it up fresh. I keep my whole system backed up disk image once or twice a week by acronis True Image 2014.

Don't assume that Double Driver program is doing what you hope.

You might want to go to your laptop manufacturer's web site and download their drivers as a backup. You might eventually need some oddball OEM driver that Windows doesn't supply and who knows if Double Driver has it. Just my idea of being extremely careful.

Does your Acronis recovery disk boot your PC?

Double Driver does what it is supposed to. I used it when I did the clean Windows 7 install on my other Acer 5100 laptop 32byte. That install was done as a clean install on a laptop that was an upgrade. I had to use the batch file on the upgrade install page but it worked great. I just followed all instructions and when the time came I loaded the drivers that I had backed up. A couple of them came back as unsigned so I just skipped them and either let them prompt me or I went to the Acer site. All the drivers I use are pretty well updated from the Acer site. I usually use the policy if it ain't broke don't mess with it and you wouldn't believe how many people that I talk to from forums and such that tell me you should update your drivers for no reason other than they are old. I do that case by case. I don't just run through Device Manager and start updating because something is old. Double Driver is all the drivers that are installed on my laptop now. This is a screenshot of some of the backed up Acer drivers from their site. You can see the LAN and the WLAN drivers are both backed up.PS yes the Acronis recovery cd does boot my PC. Actually I use a USB 2gb flash drive, but it does boot to the program in case and it is the latest version so it has all the bells and whistles in the Utilities section. I didn't know till I opened the program to do a backup that you can actually do a reformat to the original OS that came out of the store. I guess it works with the Recovery partitions somehow. Pretty cool if you ask me.

Did you think you were installing XP, or do you realize this is the first driver-complete OS in the installer and via Windows Updates? There are only a couple of drivers missing after that which are easily found on the PC or device maker's Support Downloads webpage.

Windows 8 doesn't even have user participation with drivers, using these advancements developed in Windows 7. Are you going to run the XP-era driver program on that too?

Did you come here for advice or to offer retro solutions for a modern OS?

The methods offered in Clean Reinstall - Factory OEM Windows 7 compile what has worked best in tens of thousands of installs we've helped since Win7 beta here at the top tech forums on the web.

gregrocker said:

Did you think you were installing XP, or do you realize this is the first driver-complete OS in the installer and via Windows Updates? There are only a couple of drivers missing after that which are easily found on the PC or device maker's Support Downloads webpage.

Windows 8 doesn't even have user participation with drivers, using these advancements developed in Windows 7. Are you going to run the XP-era driver program on that too?

Did you come here for advice or to offer retro solutions for a modern OS?

The methods offered in Clean Reinstall - Factory OEM Windows 7 compile what has worked best in tens of thousands of installs we've helped since Win7 beta here at the top tech forums on the web.

How am I making that different. I told the poster that I use the drivers that I had backed up. It's still a clean install. I just don't feel like waiting for my drivers to be found via windows updates. Why are you talking about xp an windows 8? I don't use those and I don't mention them. All I did was ask for some help and I explained myself in return. I don't come here to ruffle feathers.

I just didn't want you or others to waste a lot of your time collecting drivers since this is automated in the OS. It's important now to remind users of this since many millions are moving off of XP into a modern OS for the first time. That's all.

Every few months I come up empty in searching for a rare driver and will still install DriverMax for it's free scan and one free download per day. So they're not defunct, but using them for more than that is going down the wrong path from what we've learned here in the five years of Win7.