Help my computer recover quickly

December 8, 2011 3:24 PM

tl;dr how can I easily identify before and reinstall all of my drivers after nuking my Win7 laptop?

I've got one of those nifty ASUS laptops that doesn't come with a recovery disc. They entrusted me to make a back-up image and store it on the recovery partition of the HDD. Fools! Now it's time to reformat and reinstall Win7, and I've got some questions...

There are various reasons for my wanting a fresh install. I won't get into them here as I have a specific question or two, but I'm willing to be dissuaded if there are good reasons for it.

I have a Windows 7 iso (with my original key) that I will be using in lieu of a restore image. This is fine, except it does not have all of the ASUS utilities (that I can probably do without) and all of my drivers. So my questions:

Is there an easier way to get all my hardware and driver information on a file for reference than going through my device manager and doing it manually?

Any other good tips for nuking your machine?

Thanks!

posted by bluejayway to computers & internet (5 answers total)

Go to the Asus site and download all the drivers for your model/OS combination.
posted by wongcorgi at 3:26 PM on December 8, 2011 [1 favorite]

The laptop will almost certainly work pretty well (possibly perfectly) without all the preloaded utilities and drivers. Windows 7 should include or download the essentials on its own and, as wongcorgi said, the others can be found on the Asus website.

I'd consider skipping the Asus utilities entirely. Usually the Windows default versions are better anyway.
posted by The Lamplighter at 3:47 PM on December 8, 2011

Use Semper Driver Backup to handle it.
posted by deezil at 3:52 PM on December 8, 2011 [2 favorites]

I did this recently on a Dell Vostro. I didn't pay a whit of attention to drivers, and the Windows 7 action center was happy to tell me about anything I needed and give me a link to click to go find it.
So, I agree with The Lamplighter above - run Windows update and let Win 7 just do its thing. I'm so happy with my very un-crufty machine!
posted by hilaryjade at 4:24 PM on December 8, 2011

Seconding let Windows 7 do it for you. Run Windows Update.
posted by devnull at 1:00 AM on December 9, 2011