Hi, my friend asked me to reinstall windows for him on the above mentioned laptop. No problem I thought. Wiped the drive, reinstalled Win XP, checked device manaer, no audio driver, no video driver, no wifi driver, no modem driver and a totally unknown device... LAN does work and I can use internet, but it can't find any drivers itself. The Packard Bell website doesn't list any older laptops, I wouldn't describe this as that old. Any Ideas?
You could try the tool that they offer over at driverguide.com; sometimes it works great on older OEM systems, sometimes it finds nothing...but it is worth a shot. You could also try google; if you can find out what parts are inside, then you can go to the website of whoever made the part (for example, realtek makes audio and networking devices for many, many systems, and they offer the drivers on their own website). If the manufacturer site does not have drivers, you could do a reverse search; search google for the part number and you might find some other systems with the same device; and they might have drivers available on the OEM website.
Got the chipset and sound driver from the VIA website which is a good start, really struggling with the graphics and WIFI, theres just no info, if anyone ever asks me to recommend a laptop, I will just say anything except a bloody PACKARD BELL !!!
There is a reason they killed off the PB name in the states; they had gained such a terrible reputation for high failure rates and poor support that even PC noobs wouldn't touch them...I guess the rest of the world has not had enough exposure to their practices to know to avoid them.
