Need to reinstall drivers and windows 7 on a dell inspiron

[connjunction]

Hello,
I have the cd that I made with the drivers and windows 7. My concern is when I reinstall, I will loose all of my MY applications and have to purchase a new liscense for Office 2010 Pro. How do I work around this problem?

 

[RealBeast]

In order to save your programs you must do only a repair installation as described fully HERE. Do not do a clean re-install without fully backup up (good idea to back up anyway if you can).

 

[phil22]

It's customary to save all your application setup files and Product Keys or Serial Numbers on a separate hard drive or on optical discs, so that if you ever need to re-install any of them you can do so without any problems.

Performing a "Repair installation" won't be any good to you when the hard drive fails (and they all fail sooner or later) so don't rely on that option.

If you haven't done that, you can instead create an image of your entire hard drive and save it to an external hard drive. You can do that with third-party software or use the system-image creation utility in Windows 7:

Control Panel > Backup & Restore > Create a System Image

If you do that, you will also need to make a System Repair Disc so you can boot from it to restore your entire hard drive contents from the System Image:

Control Panel > Backup & Restore > Create a System Repair Disc

 

[soundguruman]

Open the bios and set the DVD to boot first
Put the windows 7 disk in the drive, and start the machine.
Select: "upgrade." NOT new install.
This restores the operating system to default, without erasing your applications or personal files. Your office 2010 will not be erased.
DELL DRIVERS:
Verify that your computer has "dell downloads manager" installed, if you do not have that download manager, it may be more difficult to install a driver.
IF you have the dell driver install manager, the install of drivers is faster, and automatic. It reduces confusion.

Find the dell downloads manager, and install it, with the security turned OFF.
Restart the computer after you install it.

IF you do not have the dell install manager, you may think that the driver installation is failing. The driver will not install automatically.

To install anything in a dell, turn off the antivirus and firewall, and turn off all security. If security is running it may prevent your driver from installing. Thus, causing you to pull your hair out.

Go to the Dell Website
Look up the drivers by computer model number
Enter your service tag number, your serial number, or the software tag number.
This pulls up the available drivers for the operating system you select.

If you have turned off the AV and firewall, and installed the dell installation manager, just click your video driver...and presto, it installs!
after downloading a driver it installs itself, and you restart the computer each time you install one.
after you are done downloading and restarting the system, turn the antivirus and firewall back on.

The alternate is without the install manager.
If you went into the dell website with your tag number, as above, you will see a list of make, model , version(s) of the hardware and drivers that can be installed in your computer.
write those down to look up a driver manually and download it.
You need to know the hardware configuration, what type of video hardware chip set is installed on the motherboard.
Maker, model and version designate this.
If you do not know that info, look in the full motherboard manual or computer manual, downloaded from the manufacturer website. The manual has all that info written in the specifications section.

Once you know what video maker, model and version is installed,
those drivers are downloadable one at a time, from the dell website.
OR from the hardware manufacturer website. OR from the motherboard manufacturer website.
And these do not install automatically.
Save the downloaded driver to a location you can locate.
Once again you must turn off the anti virus and firewall before installing the driver manually.
And basically follow the same as above...

 

[soundguruman]

In order to save your programs you must do only a repair installation as described fully HERE. Do not do a clean re-install without fully backup up (good idea to back up anyway if you can).

You can restore the installation by using "upgrade." Will not erase the applications or personal files. A great way to repair a defect in win 7 and it works, I've done it myself.