I was wondering, if i formated my acer aspire 3690 laptop, and clean install windows xp back onto it, will i still have drivers or what ever they are to control the touch sensetive mouse pad, and the battery etc? And does the windows xp have to be a laptop version, or doesnt it matter which xp disc i use? Because my laptop is starting to run sluggishly and takes a long time booting up, and i wanted to format and wipe everything off my hardrive so i can start again, but was just worrying about if some functions of my laptop will stop working if i format my HDD? should i go ahead, or stick where i am?
If you install a fresh XP home edition (fresh=not manufacturers recovery disks) Then you will be missing your standard drivers such as LAN, Wireless, Media, Audio, etc. You may also be missing touch pad drivers as well. Also note that if you restore with a copy of xp that isnt provided by the manufacturer you may actually have to load drivers for SATA HDD before OS installation if your machine runs of a SATA drive.
If you use a Acer restore disk all your drivers will be installed for you as part of the destructive os reinstallation.
Ah, ok. My acer aspire notebook, annoyingly didnt come with any restore or windows cd's. But my dad has a spare windows xp home edition cd that he uses. I can get the drivers back from acers site, but how would i go on about installing them, like after formating my HDD & installing windows, or before the installation in MSDOS?
