how badly do i NEED chipset drivers? can i use from another mobo?

[giantbucket]

situation - i now hate Win7 and Win8.1 due to the seemingly forced upgrade to W10, and the telemetry and anti-privacy that's being pushed down.

so i WANT TO and WILL install Vista. i can't go to XP because my hard drives (data) are GPT.

mobo is GA-F2A88XM-D3H, and for Vista32 it doesn't list any chipset drivers. but it does for XP and 7-32. hmmm... do i NEED the chipset drivers??? the machine is going to be for playing movies / music, kind of like a HTPC box. just an A8-7600 with onboard graphics to my TV, but my data drives are 3TB (GPT) and the content (assuming i can recover it from a previous Win7 crash) is obviously on NTFS which i would rather not touch using linux.

so, yeah...

1 - do i really NEED the chipset drivers, or can Vista handle things alright?
2 - can i use drivers from another brand's A88X board?
3 - or can i use Win7's chipset drivers in Vista32?

 

[andy_Man]

Win7 chipset will probably work. All win 7 is is Vista with SP3 installed. Sometimes windows has a plug in play driver and you don't need anything installed.

 

[junkeymonkey]

well one of the reasons I ditched AMD is they just dropped vista all around [I still use vista on a box] cards and all funny they list all your xp drivers and then 7 drivers but no vista ..

only thing is if the board can run off window vista default drivers that maybe your only option ? with the newer apu chip boards the 990fx boards still show full vista support on them

[example]
http://www.gigabyte.com/products/product-page.aspx?pid=5353#dl

and no you should only use the approved and support drivers for your board ..

ya something about vista AMD just don't want to support anymore like there vid-cards the last visia driver was way back 13.12 I think

 

[nukemaster]

You may as well just install 7 and turn auto updates off and get just the ones you want.

If you tell Windows 7 you do not want recommended updates(just security updates), it should not even give you the Windows 10 upgrade option.

I have never seen the Windows update with recommended updates turned off. As for the telemetry, some has always been collected. You can find lists of updates to avoid so you can minimize it.

I can see some issues, but MS simply can not fix problems without data on what caused the problem. Some of this telemetry is almost required(since most users just click don't send). If you own a cell phone, chances are it collects more data than your computer ever will.

Support for Vista is pretty much dead(even MS mostly stopped supporting[extended support for one more year]). I say this as someone with a vista box kicking around still.

EDIT.
Bottom line, generic chipset drivers work most of the time.

 

[junkeymonkey]

this is why you look at all the parts support pages and see before you buy and not find out after the fact and left holding the bag in some way

like NVidia there latest 900 cards support vista and up with there latest driver [the 960 and 950 supports xp and up]

so I guess if you needed board support the fx 900 board would of had you better covered and then a nice NVidia card with that you could of been vista covered today

 

[giantbucket]

i bought the parts late last year, before the W10 situation got so uncomfortable, and i was planning on running wither W7 or W8.1 on it. i'm only now getting around to assembling it, so.... yeah.

 

[Deleted member 217926]

Windows 10 + https://www.safer-networking.org/spybot-anti-beacon/ =

I don't even bother with that myself. I do turn off most of the built in spyware but I'm not overly paranoid. I own a car with satellite radio and a GPS, a smartphone, DVR, Fire TV etc. etc. and all those things track you. Amazon even knows when I run out of toothpaste. Hell there are some places where you leave the house and you're on camera until you're home again. Part of living in this world.

 

[giantbucket]

to me, that kind of "blind" and "oh, just take it up the <mod edit> like the rest of us" is just not acceptable. just because other pieces of tech have some of my info is no reason for me to say "aww, shucks, ok, go ahead and take all of it, you too, and yeah ok go spread it out to anyone you want and make money off of it if you want, no i don't want or need to see a penny from it"

uh, yeah. no.

 

[junkeymonkey]

I know you said no Linux but thing is you could still run off just a live dvd of it anymore the only thing to me windows has going for it today is just the ease of gaming outside of that Linux does just as good or better job [for free]

 

[giantbucket]

only two reasons i said no to linux:

NTFS - all my movies/photos/etc are on a few 3TB drives which i still need to recover from a crash
Kaveri - how well does Linux support the new tech anyways? 95% of the time the folks who use it (and i used to be one) just used old machines

i guess it could be a plan-B, if Vista just doesn't jive right with the hardware...

 

[junkeymonkey]

good for what I understand

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=amd_kaveri_ulinux&num=4

your board reviewed as well

''However, we have already used this Gigabyte board in several Phoronix articles. You can also find more benchmarks of the Gigabyte F2A88XM-D3H via OpenBenchmarking.org.'''

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=gigabyte_a88x_mobo&num=1

no , Linux runs on most everything nice old and new

phoronix is a nice place to look at these things

thing is you could boot from the Linux live dvd and acess your drives and get to your files and move them over to a good / storage drive to help save / salvage them ??

You can download the Linux Mint operating system for free. It comes as an ISO file
which you need to burn to a blank DVD. The liveDVD is then bootable and provides a
fully-functional operating system which you can try without affecting your PC. In
layman's terms, when you put Linux Mint on a DVD and place it into your computer, you
can try it out while leaving your current system intact.

https://www.linuxmint.com/documentation/user-guide/Cinnamon/english_17.2.pdf

 

[popatim]

For win7 and the win10 nag/tracking

Uninstall these updates/KB's : 2952664, 3021917, 3022345, & 3035583*

open task scheduler, navigate (in the left pane) to Library>Microsoft>Windows>ApplicationExperience and stop & delete Microsoft Compatibility appraiser and ProgramDatauploader.

Reboot

Search for updates.
Find the updates listed above in the list and then rt click on them and select Hide these updates.

I always switch to give me important updates only. MS likes to sneak the 3035583 update back in once in a while under Recommended Updates.

*you may need to uninstall the 5583 update several times as many pc's have several revisions of it installed and when you uninstll the newest one it reverts to the previous one... Sneaky.