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Say it ain't so
I had to reinstall Win 7 so I bought a generic win 7 restore DVD and now I have absolutely no network hardware or drivers. First, wouldn't any restore CD at least give you minimal connectivity so you can at least go to the internet to right yourself or is Dell that proprietary that they need to force the purchase of exclusive Dell CD's.
If it is a driver issue and I put the drivers on the HD by downloading to another computer and transferring it to the drive, do I just have install them via the device mgr?
Thanks.
Philip_Yip
7 Technologist
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16K Posts
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January 4th, 2017 15:00
Unfortunately Windows 7 Installation media is from 2009 and Windows 7 SP1 Media Refresh installation media is from 2011. Hardware released at this time or after have no native driver support.
The Windows 10 RS1 .iso is up to date to 2016 and will have much better driver support as it is only a few months old. You can still clean install Windows 10 RS1 using your Windows 7 OEM Product Key:
http://dellwindowsreinstallationguide.com/download-windows-10-oem-and-retail-iso/
beamermt79
2.3K Posts
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January 4th, 2017 17:00
The windows 7 media's generic drivers may or may not work and it sounds like it didn't. You will have to go to the Dell Support page from a separate computer and download the drivers to a USB 2.0 drive or burn them to cd/dvd
rdunnill
6 Professor
6 Professor
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8.8K Posts
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January 7th, 2017 14:00
It's easy enough to fix: if your Dell product is supported for Windows 7, go to its support page on the Dell site and download the missing drivers to removable media. Once downloaded, plug in the removable media to the Dell in question and install the drivers.
I did this on Thursday for an OptiPlex 9010 SFF which had just had its SSD provisioned with generic Windows 7 SP1 Enterprise.