Now there are a couple of ways to reinstall the drivers. The easiest way is to simply restart the PC when the driver folders have been copied back to see if Windows automatically detects drivers for uninstalled hardware. This is possible, but won't be the case for all your hardware. You can simply copy these folders out to seperate storage (DO NOT MOVE THEM) such as an external USB drive or Pen Drive. When time comes to reinstall the drivers you can copy the folders back. So how do you back up the drivers in your Windows installation and how can you use these? In all versions of Windows the drivers are stored in the C:\Windows\System32 folder in the sub-folders Drivers, DriverStore and if your installation has one, DRVSTORE. These folders contain all the hardware drivers for your operating system. In the folder location, C represents the drive on which you have Windows installed, this may be a different letter on your system.
The hardware driver support in Windows 7 is just fantastic, especially with consumer hardware with more and more companies submitting their drivers for official certification from Microsoft than ever before. This not only means driver support on the Windows 7 installation DVD, but also through Windows Update. You can still find computers however for which the driver support is lacking, my own laptop, the Dell M6600 is a great example of this where the drivers for the graphics (both internal Intel and nVidia), USB3, biometrics, touch-panel, Wi-Fi, Ethernet and SD Card reader are not installed automatically by Windows, nor by Windows Update. Each one requires a driver download from the Dell website (which is annoying!)
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