my "old" hardware doesnt have win 8 drivers what now???

hya

to make it short , i have g41tm-p33 mobo that have g41 chipset express , with quad cpu .
no driver will be developed for it according to intel web site ( ) , so what u guys think? should i use windows 8 build in drivers ?
are they same speed / stability /quality as manufacturer??

 

Usually the gap between drivers you get from the source and default drivers is the software packaged with the drivers when you download from the motherboard maker site. The actual drivers (small part that actually tells your OS how to use the hardware) is the same.

Looking HERE I do no see specific windows 8 drivers so I suspect you will have to do some work if any are missing after you install and update windows.

This one concerns me because if windows 8 does not have native drivers you wont be able to update via LAN.

If you can swing it the best option is to get a new hard drive to do a test install to see where windows 8 leaves you. This is never a bad idea because even if this does not work out you can still use the new hard drive for backup, something that most people do not do enough of.

 

THIS guy seems to have windows 8 working on your motherboard.

 

first 10x nosirrah for the deep looking in my case , what i can tell you , before i post it , i do some research including enter msi site to see there are none win8 drivers , i also INSTALL win 8 on my pc after image my certain win 7 to safe place
the point is , windows does load and look normal but it lake the manufacture drivers , and this d00d from your link does run his win 8 with windows 8 default drivers thing i am sure decrease overall system performance .

edit : i also see he is using an add on vga adapter (Videocard: Gigabyte GV-N430OC-1GL GeForce GT430) no the one that is build in to the mobo .

 

maybe the best for me is to buy new VGA adapter that support windows 8 , but there is no solution to install my board chipset only driver since it come in bundle with the vga driver ...

 

Chipset is not really a driver. In reality it is just info about new hardware that makes it easier for the OS to install the right drivers. I would be willing to bet that in your case it would not change anything.

Even a really cheap one will accomplish this.

THIS will get the job done on the cheap and do no worry about the PCIe version, they are all compatible with each other and on a low end card there is no chance of running into bandwidth issues anyway.

 

BTW, I usually recommend against updating BIOS but in your case it may be a good idea. Looking at the release notes it looks like they really fixed a lot of problems and made a lot of upgrades.

BIOS

 

nosirrah , 10x for the value info and the great help , i already found same price and almost same vga adapter in my near by shop .

http://www.sapphiretech.com/presentation/product/product_index.aspx?leg=&psn=0001&pid=315&lid=1

my most concern now is this , coz the missing of chipset driver (inf) , does i impact my windows performance or its just like u said it for easy os id stuff

 

The only way you will "feel" additional speed is by switching from IDE to AHCI mode in BIOS before you install windows. Most older boards came with IDE mode for default, this is for better compatibility. Windows 8 should have no problems installing in AHCI mode and this will get you a little more drive performance. Switching from onboard video to a dedicated card will also get you a little more speed as some CPU and RAM is freed up in the process.

Aside from that maxing out your ram and switching to a SSD are the only other ways to upgrade in a way that you will notice but given the age of the board you would be better off saving the $ for a complete upgrade in the future.

As far as the chipset update goes, it is unlikely to have anything that 8 does not already take care of.

 

so , if i skip chipset driver install in windows 8 it wont reduce or harm my pc performance ?

 

Yeah, I agree and I do think that does cause some confusion for many - because when you upgrade the chipset, it typically includes a whole bunch of drivers for the system too, in addition to the inf files. For example, the chipset installation package typically includes the drivers for memory controllers, various I/Os on the motherboard, and most importantly, it sets up communications between the major components. So while not technically a driver, it does many of the same functions and the package often includes drivers for system components, so they are often called chipsets drivers.

For example, if you look at the readme.txt file located in the .zip chipset download for your motherboard, you will see it includes INF files, as well as support for PCIe, IDE, SATA, USB interfaces.

I think the question here should be why? Why are you installing W8 on this older system? What is on it now? W7? If you are expecting improved performance, it is not likely you will see any.

Note that W8 uses the same driver set as W7, which uses (more or less) the same driver set as Vista. So in theory, you should be able to use Vista drivers on a W8 machine. But theory and real-world often don't see eye-to-eye. While there are W7 drivers available, I am not sure I would do the upgrade. It is much better (typically fewer problems) to install new operating systems on new hardware designed for it. One of the biggest problem areas migrating to W7 was for those upgrading older hardware. So if you are happy with the performance now, I would not mess with it.

No harm, but my concern is the computer may not boot. I suspect with that motherboard only a couple years old and it clearly has W7 32-bit and 64-bit drivers available, and a little luck, you will not have problems. But for sure, make sure you have a good backup of any data you do not want to lose - just in case.

 

my system is 2 years old , running win 7 x64 on quad cpu with 4 giga ram , using sata 2 HD , and i hope to see some improvement while switching to win 8 x64 , first it will be a clean install not my already running win 7 that run for 2 years almost and sec the benefit of win 8 new stuff and tech ...

what i will do i will buy a new VGA adapter , it will boost my performance over win 7 for sure and hopefully in win 8 also ... (if missing inf aint issue )

 

You should not expect any performance improvements - Windows 7 is already no slouch, with any waits generally due to hardware restrictions (RAM and clock speeds, slow hard drives) or Internet bandwidth - not the OS itself.

But there are certainly several features Microsoft thinks Windows 8 users will like. One area that really interest me is improved multi-monitor support. Microsoft has finally realized there are many of us who cannot live with just one monitor and who really don't care about "Touch" support.

I think a clean install whenever migrating to new OS version is best - rather than an in-place upgrade. While I am confident Microsoft has the upgrade process well figured out, when you upgrade, there generally is lots of old stuff left abandoned on the drives that are nearly impossible for the normal user to determine if safe to delete or not.

 

Atheros AR8131 should have drivers already in Windows 8. You do not need chipset drivers; you may however lose some diagnostic information (performance will be unaffected).

Your audio has drivers available from VIA for Windows 8; you should think about the graphics card as Intel's GMA series has had spotty support for Vista/7/8 from the beginning.

 

well i agree , i know on board vga sux bad , and my also among them
i will combine all info i get from you guys and decided what to do , i think staying with win 7 x64 will not hurt my surfing experience or pc using a bit

cheers and 10x!!!

 

one more last issue to cover , does my new vga adapter IMPROVE youtube watching clip quality or any other flash / html5 video clip watching??

 

check station drivers website for some of the most updated drivers for everything if i cant find one its usually there. the site does throw some pop ups though i have yet to have anything detect them as malicious but they have drivers for just about anything you could need if it exists

 

10x for the site and info i will get on it asap

 

I'm running Windows 8 on a 6 year old laptop. It is running noticably faster than Windows 7 did on the same machine, and using less RAM. There is a minor issue, in that Windows does not recognize when the lid is closed, so I need to manually put it into sleep mode.

However, everything else works fine and I'm really glad I spent the $40 to upgrade, and I will be doing the same on some of my other laptops, all of which are at least a few years old.

 

I am glad you had a good experience upgrading. Did you take any benchmarks before and after to see if the performance gains are real?

I am especially glad you found drivers for your 6 year old notebook. I would not attempt to upgrade any of your old system unless you verify availability of drivers first.

 

I thought you'd ask that, and, no I haven't done any benchmarking. But in my opinion it is faster than the clean install of Winows 7 I was running prior to upgrading.

I have run the Windows 8 upgrade advisor, on three other old laptops ranging in age between 4 and 6 years old, and no hardware issues were identified.

I'm guessing that that the lack of drivers is only going to be an issue with less common devices.

I bought a second copy of Windows 8 last night, and am going to attempt to do an upgrade install from Windows 7 on my ThinkPad T400 tonight.

 

I've done the install on my T400 now as well. Doing an inplace upgrade did not work - this is the third machine I've tried it on as it has failed (but according to Google many people are having such issues), and yes I had removed any software I was instructed to remove because it's not compatible with Win 8. Frustratingly you are told that the install failed, but are not told why. Also, the setuperr.log seems to be of little help in finding the cause of the failed upgrade.

The only good thing here is that it reverts back to your old Win 7 setup without any issues. I wanted to take my Windows 7 install from my ThinkPad T61 and upgrade it to Windows 8 to use in my T400. I was expecting to have some problems with switching the harddrive to another machine with different hardware, but not so. Windows 7 continued to work fine on the other computer, and Levovo's System Update software automatically found all the missing drivers (due to the T500 having differnet video and sound chips, etc) as soon as I booted up after switching harddrives.

I did a clean install, and everything is working except for a few devices that don't have drivers installed. I went to Devices and Printers which is not as easily accesible as under Windows 7 due to the Metro interface, and right clicked on icon for my laptop and selected troubleshoot. Usually this will find any missing drivers and will either downloaded them via Windows Update, or in some cases you will be given a link to download the installer for the driver via Action Center. In this case none of the drivers were found. There was one soultion offered under action center, which when I opened said it didn't apply to my computer as it was a solution for Windows 7. On a plus side however, unlike on my Vaio the screen brightness shortcut keys are working, and also it is going to sleep when I close the lid. However, while I can use the up and down volume keys, the mute button does nothing.

I will have a look at Lenovo's Windows 7/8 drivers, and also maybe install DriverGenius to try and find the missing drivers.

Although Lenovo does list some Windows 8 drivers on its support page for my laptop, the only update that Lenovo's System Update program found was the software for the laptop's harddrive shock protection.

I'm starting to think that I was a bit hasty to upgrade to Windows 8. As Windows 7, for now, has much better driver support. On my Vaio I'm experiencing minor but annoying glitches in the sound when streaming audio, and on my Thinkpad, Lenovo's support for Windows 7 is excellent.

It's a shame that to install Windows 8 Pro, you need a product key. Unlike Windows 7 where you could at least install it without a product key and trial it before buying a key.

 

I ran into a major problem myself trying to install windows 8. It seems that if you have an ivy bridge laptop with only intel USB 3 ports (no USB 2 at all) you simply cannot install windows 8 unless you use an optical drive which if you usually use via USB, you are hosed.

The USB 3 drivers included with windows 8 do not support USB 3 installing and intel will not be making any to fix this issue.

Mind you that in windows 7 all you need to do is modify boot.wim to allow USB 3 installations but since there are no windows 8 drivers for this USB 3 controller there is no way to do the same procedure.

 

finally i bough a vga that suit win 8 , but i am not going to switch to it atm since it may or already have some games Compatibility issue ... so i hold foot atm and observe

 

I have fixed the driver issues on my ThinkPad by downloading the drivers from Lenovo's website. Also some drivers I downloaded with Driver Genius. Also I installed several of Lenovo's own utilities, and they are working.

I am having a video issue - the on board Intel grahpics is working fine, but I can't get a driver to install for the nVideo Radeon HD video. I believe I may be able to fix this by setting the laptop to run only with discrete graphics in the BIOS. With power mangement software for the laptop (which is running fine under Windows 8 ) you can switch between both video cards when the laptop is runnning - you don't have to reboot to change cards like for most laptops. However, not having this functionality at the moment is not a big deal for me.

I am going to stick with Windows 8 on this computer. I'll probably disable Windows Defender (in Win 8 Windows Defender is an antivirus) and replace it Roboscan (as Roboscan is lighter). Windows Defender does not seem to have any noticable impact in general use - although I have not tried turning off real time protection yet for a comparison. However, when a download is finished in Internet Explorer the security scan is taking a while.

On my Vaio I'm keeping it as a dual boot system with both Win 7 and 8 for now.