Using SIW

Navigate to the Hardware section to gather information about key components of your PC’s hardware configuration. The first stop is the Motherboard option. This screen shows details about what chipset your motherboard contains, along with what processor you have installed. I have highlighted these in the screenshot.

The SIW Motherboard information screen.

The next useful screen is the Network Cards section. This screen shows model information about any network cards installed in your machine. My configuration displays both a wired and a wireless network card highlighted.

The SIW Network Cards information screen.

Another section that contains useful information about your driver configuration is the Video section. This displays your model of video card, along with the name of the driver file currently installed. In many prefab computers, the video card is integrated into the motherboard. In other cases the video card will be a discrete card. This screen will show detail of your configuration in either case.

The SIW Video information screen.

Now it’s time to apply some brainpower. SIW should have made it simple to identify some of your PC’s major components: motherboard chipset, graphics card, and network cards. For more detail about the drivers, and for information about other drivers present on the system, you’ll need to refer to the drivers.txt file that you created with driverquery. Best practice is to download the most recent reference drivers for XP from the manufacturer website for each system component.

Finding the drivers

As an example, I’ll walk through my experience with drivers. The Inspiron 531 has a motherboard based on the nVidia nForce 430 chipset, as shown by SIW. Also shown by SIW is the primary network card, an nVidia network controller, and the video card, an nVidia GeForce 8600GT. I acquired the drivers for all of these items from the nVidia website by downloading the latest nForce and GeForce drivers. The network driver was included in the nForce chipset driver package so I did not need to download it separately.

My sound card identified itself clearly as a Realtek HD sound card by presenting a notification icon in the system tray. I simply downloaded the latest HD sound driver for XP from the Realtek website. Since my system contains a dual-core AMD processor, I also downloaded the AMD Dual Core Optimizer from the AMD website.

Two items proved to be troublesome, and both are forms of wireless networking. When I originally purchased my Dell, I spec’d it with both an 802.11g wireless network card and a Dell Bluetooth receiver. I made a gamble that the Bluetooth driver would be available via Windows update after the XP install. This gamble did not pay off.

The wireless network card is identified as a Broadcom by SIW. Unfortunately Broadcom does not provide a reference driver for all of its chipsets; my next step was to look at the driverquery result to find that the chipset is a Broadcom 43XX series. After searching the Broadcom website, it appears that the manufacturer does not provide a reference driver for this chipset series at all, though there seem to be reference drivers for all higher numbered chipsets. I eventually solved this problem by digging out the booklet for the WiFi card. The cover of the booklet identified the wireless card as a WL-138G_V2 and the last page identified the manufacturer as Asus, so I was able to track down a driver specific to this card on the Asus website.

Finally, you’ll need to save all of the drivers you’ve collected, along with your drivers.txt file, onto a disk or USB drive. Your network drivers will be absolutely critical to restore functionality later, so make sure you don’t skip finding one. It will also be necessary to back up any files you’ve created or data you’ve saved to your Vista machine at this point, because a fresh install of Windows XP will overwrite the entire hard drive.