I am sitting here, putting the drivers back into a Sony Vaio laptop. It has several drivers in some categories, but of those only a few explicitly want you to download one in particular first.
I have been looking for the lowest number and going to the largest regardless.
So am I just wasting my time or do I need to install all the drivers in each category even if the only difference is the number?
In my experience (and I own a VAIO SB) you just need the driver with the highest version number in each category.
In general, you normally need only to locate the most recently-released driver, ensuring that it’s the right one for your hardware device and OS version, then install that.
A little background might help here - why are you needing to reload drivers? Have you just wiped and reinstalled the OS? What OS?
This is a Sony Vaio, probably two years old, running Windows 7 Home Premium x64.
At first the profiles would get corrupted, causing the previous owner to remake a profile every 2 or 3 months. Then it stopped letting you make new profiles. Then the thing started having seizures. Occasionally it gave a BSOD, but usually it just froze or did really weird things until it was restarted. Finally crashed to a no boot state. I have been messing with it since.
I tried putting Ubuntu on it, ant the touchpad started working properly. It reverted back to half working after I updated Ubuntu. Except for the touchpad it seems to be working again although I haven’t tried to make another user Profile.
((I chased all the dust bunnies out first thing when I inherited it. I think a lot of the crashing was heat related.))
I am not sure I completely understand, but:
You should not need to download older versions of the same driver first, as jz78817 says.
Some drivers may not work properly until you install another one first, however. Certain “lower” drivers like sound and video may require flashing the BIOS or updating the chipset, etc. If you do mess with the BIOS, read the directions carefully. Thankfully AFAIK messed up flashes are recoverable on newer computers; those of yore were not so fortunate.
FWIW given the described symptoms I would start with new hard drive before anything else. They are relatively inexpensive. Even SSDs are fairly cheap these days.