Windows 98 driver gurus:
So I was given an old HP Pavilion (4535, 400 Mz Celeron, in case you care), running Win98. It would be a fine web-surfing/word processing machine for a friend, once I wipe windows and re-install it to get rid of all the pre-installed junk and inevitable wincruft accumulation and registry bloat.
The problem is that I don’t have the software disks with hardwarer driver files. While HP’s website has a few driver files to download, for some reason I have a nagging suspicion that there’s one or two missing.
Is there a way to copy just the hardware drivers from a running install of Win98, and save them externally, in a form such that I can later convince a new clean install of Win98 to use them?
It’s sometimes possible to do this, but I think you’d be better off getting fresh drivers anyway.
You should be able to download them at a site like driverguide.com.
You are in the fortunate position of having the system working at present, so you can use Windows Device Manager to identify your hardware devices - which should make locating the correct drivers quite simple - you could even download the necessary drivers before the nuke-and-pave - in fact, I’d recommend doing this for at least the display, network and modem.
If you want to do it the messy way, Windows Device Manager should also be able to tell you the location and names of the files constituting the driver, but there’s a possibility you’ll be taking some of the cruft with you that way and in general, it’s a recipe for a flaky system.
I hope you’ll be putting something sensible, like Windows 2000, or even XP, on instead. A C400 will be fine unless you want to play games. Here’s HP’s support page, which, as you say, is rather lacking.
If the intended purpose of the machine is web, email and word processing, and the end user connects to the internet via an ethernet cable to a cable modem or broadband router or similar, I’d say Linux would be an ideal solution (and I’d recommend Ubuntu) - On a machine of that spec, it should run better than any of the WinNT family.
Thanks for the replies. I agree than Linux would be a good solution, if I wanted to take a couple weeks to learn it, but there are other hobbies calling me right now. It’ll be dial-up anyway. I could go with win2000, but wouldn’t be able to use the existing drivers; if I can get new Win2k drivers, that’s the likely path.
If driverguide.com is a reliable source, then that’s probably the solution.
Just for curiosity, though, if I go the messy way and just save the various files ID’d by device manager, how do I re-install them on the clean OS? Would I be able to just copy the files to the directory they were in originally, and then point Windows to one of them when it recognizes new hardware and asks for the driver?
Phew. If you are lucky enough to be pointed at an installation directory that contains a bunch of different files including one with the extension .inf, then you should just be able to tell Windows to look in that directory when it asks you about the new hardware. Otherwise, it would be a case of trying to reproduce the directory structure and contents on the new machine, but you’d probably have to hunt down and reproduce registry settings and other stuff - I’m inclined to say this is technically possible, but practially impossible for everyone except perhaps folks like the developer(s) that originally created the driver, and hardcore hackers.
It’s very unlikely that driverguide won’t have your drivers.