i need help

[Melissa Rooney]

Can i use a windows vista toshiba disk on a dell dimension 5000 please help i have windows xp ,i had to reinstall and all drivers are gone and i cant seem to download any,i paid for windows 8 and computer crashed.
its up and running not with no help from micro because i would not give them 75 euro anyway figured it out myself.

 

[Saga Lout]

It's a No to the first question. OEM (Original Equipment Manufacturer) disks from one company won't work in another's equipment. If you have Windows 8 but are short of a few drivers, use is method to find the right ones.

You need to go into Control Panel>Device Manager and scroll to the first entryu with a yellow mark beside it, right click it and go to Properties then click the Details tab. Scroll to HardwareIDs and take a note of the four characters which follow VEN for Vendor and also the four following DEV for Device.

Go to http://www.pcidatabase.com and input those characters in the two relevant boxes and follow the trail to the right driver. When you find the list of the Vendor's drivers, they aren't in order so use your browser's Find facility to track the Device details. With luck you'll have an executable file but some will be a zipped folder. Do the same for all the other yellow marked entries.