Where to find different drivers for a new laptop?

[adonnis]

Hi everyone! I purchased an ASUS laptop that comes with a driver disk branded 'Win 10-only compatible'. Much to my frustration, on their website the company offer no other driver versions so what about users of other OS? I have used Win 10 and I don't like it, would much prefer 7. And what about Linux users?! Where do they get drivers and where do I find ones that support Win 7?

 

[hang-the-9]

If there are no drivers from the vendor of the laptop, you can go through the components one by one and download them from the manufacturers web site. Say Realtek for audio, Intel for network card or chipset, etc.. You will need to find the brands and models of everything though, and some may not work. For Linux, most setups should work OK with most laptops. Make sure you have a backup of your system and try it. Or boot off a Linux Live disk and test it first.

 

[Scottray]

Sorry - most new laptops are not fully backwards compatible with Windows 7 due to the underlying chipset. The windows 10 drivers may work with Windows 7, but no guarantee. Note that there's many online articles about how to make Windows 10 look and feel like Windows 7. Besides, Windows 7 support ends sometime in 2020 - no more patches or security updates.

In regards to Linus, most distributions include drivers with the install package. Then, since it's open source, you can search for a particular driver or participate in a forum and someone may write/modify a driver for the distro community if need realy exists.

 

[Prostar Computer]

OEMs don't usually provide much - if any - support for Linux, for various reasons. As for Win 7, some drivers you can get through their respective vendors (NVidia, Intel, AMD, etc.) directly, others you might be able to modify to force install, even, but as Scottray said, there are technologies that Windows 7 doesn't support natively that also make installing it on current computers more of a challenge.

 

[adonnis]

there are technologies that Windows 7 doesn't support natively that also make installing it on current computers more of a challenge.

What are these technologies?

 

[Scottray]

Here's 2 articles that discuss the issues:
https://www.makeuseof.com/tag/windows-7-wont-work-intels-current-next-gen-cpus/
https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2017/04/new-processors-are-now-blocked-from-receiving-updates-on-old-windows/

Basically, if you're going to connect your laptop to the internet, you need security updated. Windows 7 is not going to get security updates. So, use Windows 10 or a Linux distro.

 

[Prostar Computer]

What are these technologies?

Just saw this message.

Things like USB 3.0, PCIe/NVMe drives, newer chipsets & CPUs (I believe anything past 6th generation, a.k.a SkyLake), etc. It's doable on some systems, but can be a big pain to slipstream all the necessary drivers into the Windows 7 setup.