Vista - Vista64 Clean Install and Intel Chipset

Hello
I have searched the internet for information on 64 bit computing and discovered this wonderfull forum. Thank you!

My question: During my fresh install of Vista Home Premium 64, I never installed any drivers. My intent was to be as "squeaky" clean as possible, assuming MS would install just what was required to get me up and running. I have a driver disk that came with my machine and I created a CD with updated drivers prior to the install, and I would install the drivers in the proper order. Now, after reaching the Desktop (no internet connection yet) I proceded to Device Manager to see what drivers I needed and prepared my DVD/CD writer with my driver disk. To my suprise, the Intel Chipset Driver was installed as well as my Memory Controller, USB Controller, ect, except my Richo Card Reader. No biggie, I have the drivers on disk.
I have been running this way, no "explaination point thingies" since and see no problems. Do I need to install the Intel Chipset software from Intel, so the OS knows how to configure my devices or did MS provide the driver during install?

Hello Vonbrown,

Welcome to the Forum.

During installation Vista provided the generic drivers for all hardware. Some of these drivers will be replaced by the recent ones during Windows update. If you have got the CD with the original drivers you should install them. These drivers are specially written for the hardware which will work with its full potential. I'm talking about the graphic card, sound card, modem, WiFi card and such.
It doesn't matter in which order the drivers will be installed, the most important is to reboot the system after installing each one.

Hope it helps.

most pc vendors recommend installing drivers in a certain order, usually starting with the chipset. then hard disk controllers, then memory controllers, then graphics,sound,LAN/wifi.
if you know the make and model of all your components, you can hunt down all the drivers yourself if you want the latest. the drivers microsoft provides are almost never the most recent, since they have to go through extensive testing.
there are a couple of decent driver update programs if you are willing to pay the subscription fee. otherwise, you can download a trial version and just make note of the driver versions and dates, so you can download them manually.