What is Reddit's opinion of DriverPacks?

From 3.5 billion Reddit comments

This is something I struggle with as well. We buy computers in batches and do not have any uniformity across our 225+ machines. I always struggle with drivers. I've actually stopped buying Lenovo machines because their drivers are a freaking nightmare.

I house drivers on WSUS that helps. The best thing I do is I downloaded all the drivers from 'http://driverpacks.net/' get both the x86 & x64 (as x86 drivers are still used very much) I keep all of these drivers unzipped on a portable drive and on a file share. That I point device manager to.

If these two things fail you can look at the hardware ID's in device manager and usually google will point you in the right direction. I keep images on FOG of all of our machines so I don't have to do this nightmare...even if its a single 'one off' laptop.

I use nLite with Driver Packs and do a mostly unattended install of XP. With the driver packs slipstreamed, I would say about 95% of most device drivers are included. Very nice for newer systems with SATA drives. Saves that extra pain in the butt step of putting the drivers on a floppy, etc.

Snappy Driver Installer is open source. You can audit and contribute to it. Been using it for years.

The drivers that SDI downloads are from the DriverPack team which is a very old project that started to catalog drivers to streaming into Windows installers.

It matches hardware ID's for installed hardware to hardware IDs in the driverpacks. This can result in getting more up to date drivers from a specific part manufacturer instead of out of date crap from an OEM web site. Occasionally it can fuck up touchpads because of weird hardware IDs, in which case you just restore the OEM driver.

It is all legit.

Once I downloaded DriverPacks because of a laptop network card we couldn't get to work. It solved the problem, and it was torrent only. Though I doubt a normal user should have a need to use torrents.

As funwok said, it will either install automatically, or you'll need to download the dirver elsewhere. Manufacturer page, Windows Update, etc. Whatever place has it, if it exists. I don't know how old or what card this is, so I can't say.

And if that doesn't work: DriverPacks. Download a zip file of hundreds of drivers, and then point to that folder when installing from Device Manager. Windows Vista/7/8 searches subfolders, and it will install the correct driver if it finds it. If not, you're out of luck and have to continue looking elsewhere(manufacturer's site, Windows Update, etc). Or, just spend $20 on a new adapter.

64-bit Driverpack for wifi: http://driverpacks.net/driverpacks/windows/7/x64/wlan/12.03

32-bit Driverpack for wifi: http://driverpacks.net/driverpacks/windows/7/x86/wlan/12.03

Note, this will not work on XP with the XP Driverpacks. XP does not search subfolders when installing drivers manually in Device Manager.

I have a USB drive that has every 32 and 64 bit driver for vista/win7 available to download off driverpacks.net. Just have to pop in the drive, tell device manager to update driver from the computer and point it to the drive. I rarely have to download drivers from the manufacturer anymore :D

Basically, you download all the drivers and extract the 7z files to folders. On the root of the drive, I have folders called 32bit and 64 bit, with the respective drivers in each folder. Cuts the scan time in half if you point it to the right folder when it scans for drivers.

Also, it isn't perfect and not all drivers will load correctly, but problems are few and far between on normal hardware. I also made a folder called Misc that has drivers that aren't part of the driver packs like PCI-->serial cards and USB 3.0 controllers (maybe they are part of the packs now...my drivers haven't been updated in a few weeks. All in all, it takes about 6GB to hold everything.

I ended up manually adding them into the boot image (installer) using DISM from the Windows AIK. The Windows Deployment interface doesnt really allow you to add unsigned drivers, so I ended up mounting the image and manually adding the entire x64 NT6 LAN DriverPack using DISM.

Got to Driverpacks, grab the pack you need, and extract it to a folder on your boot USB, when it comes time to choose a drive pick the option somewhere near the bottom to load a driver, I believe you can just let it search the folder for a driver to load but I can't remember.

It grabs the drivers from the driverpacks project which is a project to gather every device driver possible for making live windows disks and rate the driver by stability.

That being said, I'm pretty sure they grabbed the drivers from the OEM, since it reloaded a lot of the dell branded driver applications onto my dell. It selects the most stable drivers over newer ones, but you can override that.

It doesn't install, it just runs from an unzipped folder. I would choose the winter theme, it seems the most functional.

If you have Norton though, disable everything about it. The only time I've ever seen it fail, Norton was attempting to silently stop the driver installation for some reason and left the system unstable. Any other antivirus won't do that, just Norton.

It's worth a try on a test machine at least, I've started using it on any computer that the computer company that we use sends back since they never install any drivers outside what comes with windows.

Just coming here to say: http://driverpacks.net

Maybe you can find a working driver in one of their packs? Use the Windows 7 driver packs as I (and a few others) have had success getting them to work well with Windows 8.1.

Driver Pack Solution

It's a large, DVD sized ISO but it's got almost everything. It can automatically install/update drivers or you can have it extract the files to manually install. It uses drivers from DriverPacks.

Driverpacks would be pretty much everything you need. I don't know about Windows 7, but the Windows XP driver packs weigh in about 1.5GB after all is downloaded.

I've had it fail but only on the newest of the new hardware.

Don't undercut too much, your time is valuable. What are their rates that you consider them hugely overpriced?

Get yourself some up-to-date Windows disks, as Windows reinstalls may likely become your bread and butter. Searching torrent sites for "os + untouched" often finds you uncracked ISOs. Get a flashlight and some compressed air. Get yourself a driverpack.net LAN disk, so you don't have to fumble getting their network drivers. Get a flash drive with a bunch of portable apps (winsock fix, norton removal too, registry patches, etc).

Would this be out of your home exclusively, or would you offer onsites?

There's a way, but you might not like it! (this reaching pretty far back, because I haven't used Windows in a while.)

You'll need

• a working windows machine

• a blank cd

• iso editing program

• the internet

Do this:

1. Put in your windows XP CD (to the working computer :)

2. Use your iso editing program to save the disk to an ISO

3. extract the contents of the ISO to a folder on your hard drive

4. In your iso editor, select all files and folders and delete them from the image. (We will use this empty iso for the finished product.. It's bootable)

5. Read this: http://driverpacks.net/docs/beginners-guide-windows-xp

6. This will tell you how to use driverpacks BASE to integrate the one driver pack that you absolutely need: Mass storage

7. Once you successfully integrate the mass storage pack into your install folder, you can drag those files back into your iso editor, and save the finished product.

8. You now have an windows ISO that will boot and be able to talk to just about any controller under the sun.

Good luck.

Thank you for the response. However, these options will not work in my case because the surface book 2 will not boot. I can boot off of a USB with the windows 10 OS on it. When it goes to install from the USB no hard drives are displayed in the setup dialog. I need the specific drivers for the SSD that I can put on the second USB. I looked for the drivers at http://driverpacks.net/catalog-drivers/notebooks/vendor-microsoft/model-surface-book-2?os=windows-10-x64 but the URL to the surface storage drivers is broke.

A good first thing to try is the driver packs at the aptly named driverpacks.net . Download all of them, unzip them into a folder, then burn all of the unzipped content to a cd (yes, for XP, it must be a CD, not a usb thumb drive unfortunately).
When you are installing something new or trying to update a driver, make sure the disc is in the drive and make sure the "search removable media" or "search floppy & cd drives" or whatever it's called option is indeed on. If there's a driver for your device on that cd, XP should find it.
You can get the packs right here, scroll down to the Windows 2000/XP/2003 section and grab them all. :-)
http://driverpacks.net/driverpacks/latest

(Side note: It may be possible to put them all into an .iso file and use a program to mount the iso as a fake cd drive, but I've never tried it myself. :-) )

Although this is certainly the easiest thing to do, you lose a lot of functionality and speed doing this. It's the lazy way out, and isn't really the best solution. The generally accepted best solution is to slipstream AHCI/RAID drivers. My personally suggested method of doing this is using integrating them using the old driverpacks mass storage txtmode integration.

The touchpad is under the PS/2 compatible mouse.

ACPI\VEN_SYN&DEV_1B7E ACPI\SYN1B7E *SYN1B7E

The latest I could find was http://driverpacks.net/catalog-drivers/device_id/hwid-ACPI%5CSYN1B7E?os=windows-10-x64

Which I installed, but couldn't get working. I couldn't find drivers to download from the Synaptics site.

I also looked into the driver properties. It says the olde version is installed, so I tried to manually update the driver and navigated to the folder. But windows told me it already had the latest version and wouldn't proceed.

Try using a universal driver updater, I used that to get my P775-S7160 working 95% on Windows 10 (some stuff is still slightly wonky, but it's nothing at all critical, where before, I didn't have any drivers cause it's not supported on Win 10) DriverPacks.net

Okay, yeah I did a similar thing. Did you inject drivers with DISM into your WIM to support disk controllers etc? It can take hours but I usually inject the packs for lan, chipset, mass storage, and wifi. http://driverpacks.net/

You should be able to get GB speeds with ipxe. I think that I had to compile it myself to get the features I needed though. They have some info in the forums. It has been about two years since I set it up.

Definitely want to move away from FOG and use MDT. As a temporary break fix maybe try preloading all the Windows Network LAN Windows 7 Drivers into the C:\Windows\inf folder from here: http://driverpacks.net/driverpacks/windows/7 They helped me create a Universal Image with Ghost, but the site was a little sketchy, so scan everything.

Here you go

This is a driver pack that contains nearly every chipset you could ever need. Once it's downloaded right click on 'my computer' click on manage click on device manager then click on the lan device and right click that click on update driver software then click on browse computer and select the download location for the driver pack it'll scan all of them and find the one the matches

If you don't care about image size you can slipstream various driver packs (one resource I've used) into it so it has the basics for most everything. From there what others have suggested with sysprepping / AIK / loading WDS server with drivers.

99.9% of the drivers are signed (because they're extracted from the drivers that hardware manufactures create). Again, DriverPack Solution is just a front end installer for the packs found at http://driverpacks.net/

The only parts of it I find wonky are that if you just blast through clicking "yes" to everything, it will install an "autoupdater", offer to install apps I don't want, and try and change the OEM logo on the Windows install. All these annoyances are totally avoidable by deleting the updater program (/tools/DrvUpdater.exe), the "Branding" folder (/tools/Branding), and apps folder (/soft/).

If you want to get adventurous, there's a config file for the whole program (/tools/config.js) that you can edit the way the program works and customize many of the options.

The version I'm currently using is a little newer than the "stable" version on their website... It's version 14 R410.. I found their official torrent linked off their Facebook page. Right now I don't think they do official DVD5 (4.3gb) versions any longer, so you might invest in a 8GB flashdrive just to keep it handy for tech work.

I always make sure to seed the top 100ish packs here

Essentially it is packs of universal drivers sorted by hardware type. Mostly under 5 megs each, and super helpful to have when fixing a computer. [](/yayflutter)

Also, you could install btsync on your seedbox, and use it to host any of these folders

http://driverpacks.net/downloads

grab the driverpack base and the latest mass storage driverpack. you copy the xp disc to your HDD, use the base to integrate the new drivers and rebuild the ISO. Then just burn the iso with something like imgburn. I's not as daunting as it sounds, and the site has a good faq and forums.

Is that for home or for a business? How many PCs are you talking about?

I used to use nLite plus a set of custom tools I wrote to install Windows, with drivers and apps coming from a network share. But I finally took the time to look at MDT (Microsoft's Deployment Toolkit I believe) because I wanted to be ready when we finally decide to move to Windows 7. It turns out that MDT can install XP as well, and it does a cleaner job that nlite for example. Plus you can easily add and maintain drivers (I use the ones from http://driverpacks.net/) and applications.

At work there's basically only two notable computers that won't network boot; ~2005 Acer desktops (which like you said, you can throw a NIC in it (we keep some Intel Gige adapters around for exactly that purpose)), and some really big Asus laptops (with the SiS network adapter). Damn near every other computer we see can do it. And yes, after creating a new image, we run WDS on a customer computer, hit Windows Update, and there are none available. We also put in some drivers from http://driverpacks.net/ as well as the latest IE. We do third party programs later via a script.

Offline Update - Oh yes, I never had much success running it as a flat file - I would always have it make the ISO, and I'd burn and run from that.

http://driverpacks.net/ are useful to put on CDs/DVDs (my Driver Pack LAN is my most-stolen CD at work :) )

For computers, we bought a subscription to http://www.driveragent.com/ We get 500 scans a year for $100 I think - pays for itself in 5 pain-in-the-ass installs or XP downgrades.

Start by booting a GParted LiveCD. Remove all partitions from the disk and attempt to install 7 again :)

Failing that slipstream some driverpacks into your install USB or DVD to rule out detection issues.

System info is always useful. Sidebar recommends posting it.

Also, Try slipstreaming some drivers from Driverpacks.net or individual drivers from the component manufacturers using this method

Follow this guide to integrate the necessary SATA drivers and create a new XP installation cd

http://driverpacks.net/docs/beginners-guide-windows-xp

OR

Find if your bios supports changing SATA to IDE (sometimes called native mode)