Win XP and driver installations

[John Saito]

Rob

There are some forum postings that imply that one has to be very orderly about the installation of drivers. These postings state that after Win XP, the chipset drivers should follow next, followed by Direct X and Windows updates, and then the video card, sound card, and other drivers. Makes sense, but why? And, would there be problems created if I mistakenly deviated from that order of installation? Thanks. BTW, the strength of this forum is that folks tend to write in plain English :) . You are to be commended for setting a great example on this.

John

[Rob]

It's my understanding that the motherboard chipset drivers should be installed first, followed by the DirectX drivers, followed by the video card drivers. It makes sense to do it in this order because that way they are being installed from the lowest level driver to the highest level driver.

The motherboard chipset drivers should always come first because they are the lowest level for all of the other drivers. However, when Windows installs it provides generic drivers that allow many components to operate sufficiently, but maybe not completely.

Also, I've not noticed it to be a problem to update to a new version of the the driver for the chipset, DirectX or video card once the initial installation was complete. By this I mean it was not necessary to uninstall from the top down and then reinstall from the bottom up. I simply installed the new driver. In fact, I believe Microsoft does not officially support uninstalling a version of the DirectX drivers.