Are they all the same - LAN Drivers

I have just dealt with a few PC's but the LAN drivers arento part of the installation.

A stupid question of sorts, but are they MOBO specific?

Cheers.....Q

I presume you mean MB's with integrated LAN cards? If so, they're generally chipset specific which the mobo man'f has built in to the mb (realtek, Intel etc.) The man'f usually supplies a driver for the device on the install disc etc. that come with the mobo and sometimes has a bepsoke install and setup front end, but usually, just a graphic variation of the oem one.

I imagine it can be a case that some mobo's have a '4 in 1' chipset driver that you install and if you don't install this item, can cause problems for other integrated devices, even when you've installed the specific devices drvier.

I've had problems before with built in sound chipsets and find the one on the man'f disc is flakey so once you know the chipset, you can go to the main man'f site of the original chip device and grab their version.

I have done a lot of reformatting mates PCs recently, I always goto the manufacturers site of the motherboard or if it is a prebuilt PC/laptop that page and download all the drivers. Bit annoying how the only option is separately but I then install them all. I have had a couple of PCs that still have SM Bus uninstalled on the device page so I used a CD called Windows XP Universal Drivers CD and it usually has the right driver on it.

You can build your own install CD with loads of integrated drivers by downloading the software and driver packs from this site http://www.driverpacks.net/DriverPacks/

I tend to just go for the Mass Storage, Chipset and Network drivers. Mass storage to guarantee you don't get a stop 0x7b (inaccessible boot device) error, Chipset to make sure that windows can talk to the network card properly and the Network Card drivers so that I can access to the net to download latest versions of graphics drivers (which are bound to have been updated the next time you come to install your system)

I found an excellent driver DVD on newsgroups that is about 2gb - I would suggest anyone who builds PC's get one, as they can take a while to find the right driver, but this saves a lot of hassle in the long run.