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Hi! I’m Kevin…and this is Randy…
I am!
And we work for the HP Customer Care Web Support Team
we do!
And we get a lot of comments from customers asking us
“how do I find software and drivers for my HP products…?”
So that’s what we’re going to do today.
We’re going to try and tell you every way that we know
how to find software and drivers for HP products.
So Randy: if you were at home and you had this PC,
what would be the first place you would
go to to get software and drivers?
Me? I would start with HP Update.
It’s a software tool that comes on the PC.
You click “Start - > All Programs”…
scroll down to a folder called “HP” and then click “HP Update”.
When you do that and you’re connected to the Internet,
the software tool automatically figures out what’s on your system,
what’s not on your system and what’s available from the server
and it gives you a big list of everything that you want,
that’s there for you to install.
And you can be selective and select just what you want to install.
Or you can select them all and then click “Next”.
So you don’t need to know which versions
you have or which software you need,
this software goes and finds everything
that’s available for your product.
True, it takes the work out of it for you,
so that’s why I would go there first.
Okay, so these are updates but
what if I needed to reinstall the original driver?
Like something happens – my sound goes ut or something
like that and maybe I’m not connected to the Internet.
How would I install software and drivers then?
Okay. Well there are several things you can do.
But again if you start with the tools that come with the PC,
probably the first thing I would do,
if you are not connected to the Internet,
is to use a restoration tool that
HP provides which is called “HP Recovery Manager”.
You can get to it again via the Start Menu: “Start - >
All Programs” -> but instead of clicking “HP” you go to
“PC Help & Tools” which puts it in that folder.
And it’s called “Recovery Manager”.
“Welcome to Recovery Manager”.
What I like to do is to go straight to advanced options and
then you have 2 selections in here – “Reinstall
software programs that came with your computer”.
Or the hardware driver.
If you’re just trying to get a hardware driver back…
say you’ve lost your sound and you’re like: “I don’t know
what to do now my sound drivers gone”. Well,
you could come in here, select “Reinstall hardware drivers”,
click “Next” followed by “Next” again and it’ll give
you a list of everything that’s available.
So you can come in here and you can find
in your list which item you need, select it,
click “Next” and then go through the screens.
And it goes back to the way it was…!
Okay so you’ve tried Recovery Manager but
whatever it is you are looking for wasn’t in there.
Maybe you’ve already tried HP Update,
whatever it was you were looking for wasn’t in there.
Maybe you don’t have even have HP Update or Recovery
Manager on your PC. What would you do?
For me I’m comfortable downloading software so I would actually
jump right out to the Internet and go to HP’s website.
We already have it set here, so you’ll see hp.com.
And you come out here to the page and you select Support & Drivers.
From here you would select the “Download drivers and software”
option and then you will get this second step here
where you will need to enter your product model number.
This is very important because without your product model number
you may not find that software driver that you’re looking for.
So where would you find it?
So for this one, if you look on the front this is a TouchSmart
but it does not tell you which exact model.
It just says “TouchSmart” which is not the model number,
just the type of PC.
So there are a few places: there’s
a sticker on the back which will say model number,
and it will say what the model is.
Ah, there’s a trick! CTRL + ALT + S (Wow!)
So if you have a desktop PC, you can hold down the CTRL key,
plus ALT and S and it pulls up your product information
and it gives you your model number right up top
(exactly!)
This one here happens to be an IQ506.
So I’m going to come in here and I’m going to type IQ506 and “Go!”.
And this is going to take me to a page
that says “Select your operating system”
(It does)
And from here you choose between Windows
Vista 64-bit and regular Windows Vista.
You may on some PCs have another thing like Windows XP,
or if you have an older system you may have Windows 98 or ME.
So we know that we have Windows Vista 64-bit,
so we would select that.
From here you’ve got a listing of all of the drivers
and software that HP has made available
Probably the next place I would go is probably to Microsoft
because the operating system comes from Microsoft.
So for Windows you want to go to the Microsoft Windows update tool.
So to go to Windows updates you can just click
“Start - > All Programs” and it’s right
there at the top “Windows Update”.
Click “View available updates” so you
can see exactly what’s available.
It’s similar to HP Update.
You can go through and you can select
what you want or what you don’t want.
And you choose which ones you want.
Then click the “Install” button and off you go.
Okay so that’s Windows Update – it’s
given you the basic security fixes,
things like that, but what if you’
re still having trouble with your sound…
or something like that…so you know you still need a device driver.
For specific devices, I always like to
try going to Device Manager first.
You go to Start - > then right-click on “Computer” – of if it’s XP
“My Computer” – and then select
“Properties” from the little window that pops up.
In Windows Vista you would just click “Device Manager”.
If you’re in XP you’re going to have another “
System Properties” window that pops up,
so you’ll have to click the “Hardware” tab
and then it’s the “Device Manager” button.
But they both bring up “Device Manager”,
which looks pretty much the same in both XP and Vista.
But you have a list of devices. We’re looking for “Sound”
(you just go down and click the + sign next to Sound).
“Sound - > Video and Game Controllers”
is actually where Sound is located.
This one’s called “SoundMax integrated
digital HD audio” officially,
but if you find the device that you’re looking for in the list,
you can right-click on the name
and just select “Update driver software”.
All you’ve got to do is be online. Again, you select “
Search automatically for updated drivers and software.
It’s going to search your system and Microsoft’s website.
And it will just do it for you.
If Microsoft didn’t have it, HP didn’t have it,
maybe you’re still looking for the latest product,
maybe you’re a gamer (I am a gamer!) That’s right!
And somebody tells you you should probably update
to the latest driver for your graphics card.
Where would you go to get that?
I would go to the manufacturer’s website for that graphic card.
Okay.
So I think we still have Device Manager open here, right?
So it’s under “Display adapters”.
It’s called the Display adapter in
this case it’s your graphics card or your hardware.
In this case we’ve got right here NVIDIA GForce 9300M GS
So this has a graphics card made by NVIDIA.
So where would you go?
I would go to NVIDIA dot com or I would go to my favorite
search engine and type in “NVIDIA” and GFORCE 9300M and
GS and Driver and go there.
Yeah, there are a lot of drivers if you’re using search keywords.
So for us we’ve already gone out to NVIDIA.com.
You know most of these sites they’re all going
to be different depending on the
manufacturer – if it’s NVIDIA, Realtek, ATI, someone like that.
The good news is you get the latest
and greatest updates from the manufacturer’s website.
The bad thing is you’re going to have to play on their turf.
You’re going to have to know where the drivers are or learn
where they keep their drivers.
Right. And once you’re in this space you’re out of HP’s hands.
This is not HP giving this to you.
That’s a good point.
You’re now in Invidia’s space and HP
may not have qualified those drivers.
They’ll probably still work but they may not in some scenarios.
But here, NVIDIA, same like HP,
“Download drivers” and it’s a GFORCE,
you select your operating system which we already
talked about – 64-Bit – and you’re off and there you go.
So depending on whoever the manufacturer is,
which you found in Device Manager,
just click the plus sign,
tells you who made it, go out and search for it.
HP has a consumer support forum and it’s
at www.hp.com/support/consumer-forum.
I’m going to go to HP.com,
click “Support & Drivers” – “Consumer Forum”
(yeah it’s right there too) and here we go:
There’s a lot of people out there who are very sharp, very smart,
that know how to find all these drivers.
People come in and say: “Hey, where’s my driver for this?”,
depending on who’s online.
And they’ll come in and give you all the exact steps,
all the exact drivers you need and help you install them.
So this is a great place and this
actually solves a lot of people’s problems.
You may even bump into us out here in these forums…
maybe a bunch of happy, helpy geeks!
We’re out here a bit, others are out here a bit.
We’re not going to tell you which
people we are you’ll have to guess!
But anyway we hope that we’ve helped.
We’ve given you everything I know.
I can’t think of any other way to find
software or drivers, really, can you?
Are you looking at me? Do you have any other ideas?
I think we’ve just covered most of it if not all of it.
There you go! See you in the Forums. Yeah, see you in the Forums! �