About Device Drivers; Installing Device Drivers - Gateway Solo 5100 Maintaining & Troubleshooting

30 Maintaining and Troubleshooting Your Solo Notebook

About Device Drivers

Device drivers are programs used to control devices attached to the computer such
as printers, keyboards, LCD display, and PC Cards. Drivers translate between the
devices and the programs. Many drivers come with the operating system while
other drivers must be loaded when a new device is added. This chapter discusses
how to load additional device drivers.
This chapter is divided into three main sections. Before installing drivers specific to
your operating system, read the next section "Installing device drivers." Then you
can move on to the appropriate section for your system: "Installing for
Windows 95" on page 32 or "Installing for Windows NT" on page 45.

Installing device drivers

There are two methods you can use to install the drivers:
Install from the System CD Browser
Install using driver diskettes that may have shipped with your system
Installing drivers using the Solo System CD
Installing drivers from the System CD is the simplest way to load drivers. The
System CD provides online instructions to step you through the process of loading
each driver. When you launch the System CD a window appears providing you a
choice of Windows 95 or Windows NT operating system. Select the operating
system your notebook uses, then choose your Solo notebook model. The drivers for
your system are listed. Follow the online instructions to load the drivers.
You may have also received some drivers on diskette. If so, they are likely to be
newer than the ones on the Solo System CD. Use the instructions "Installing drivers
using the driver diskettes" on page 30 to install from diskette.
Installing drivers using the driver diskettes
Your system may have shipped with driver diskettes. Sometimes these diskettes are
included with your system because they are updated drivers from the ones included
on the system CD. If we shipped drivers on diskette see "Installing for
Windows 95" on page 32 and "Installing for Windows NT" on page 45 to install
them from diskette.