Does Win10 auto-load latest motherboard drivers?

[pcguy9441]

....or at least "good enough" drivers?

I just did a fresh Win10 install on a 10 yr old system with a Gigabyte GA-G41MT-ES2L motherboard.

Google tells me Windows will install all the right drivers but some say not the most current drivers. Problem is when I go to the Gigabyte download site the best they have is Win7 Pro with driver revs dated from 2010. So I see little point in installing them.

Further, when I did download the chipset drivers they are all .exe's not zips and try to unpack on themselves with file names the same as the "mother" file being unzipped. Some sort of incestuous infinite loop thing going on. Also, the original motherboard DVD will not load because the system thinks it's a Win98 disc, although 10 yrs ago it ran fine under Win7 Pro. Rock and a hard place comes to mind. The system does seem to run fine from what I see so far with just installing Office and Malwarebytes.

So, if I can just trust what the Win10 install delivered, I'll call it a day, pour myself a nice IPA and move on.

Thanks for any comments.

 

[flavallee]

You didn't describe the primary devices(graphic, audio, ethernet) your 10-year old desktop has, but a clean install of Windows 10 probably installed drivers for all of them.
Are its graphic and audio and ethernet devices all working okay?

From what I can determine, that motherboard was made in 3 revisions(1.0, 1.1, 1.3), and all have the Intel G41 chipset.
There are no downloadable chipset drivers for any operating system newer than Windows 7.

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[pcguy9441]

The Internet is working, did not try audio yet. Only add-on is PCIe wifi card which is working, and of course, the monitor works. I'll install speccy out there and check on the mobo rev#. just loaded it to a thumb drive.

I've put a ton of time into resurrecting a PC I'll probably never use, but nice to have a plan "B" if my main PC goes belly-up at a bad time. This garage spare is a Core 2 - Duo at 2.6G that I had over 3G before I switched it back to the Intel stock cooler.

 

[managed]

Check in Device Manager, if there are no ! or ? or Unknown Devices showing then the drivers are all installed and working and there's no need to do anything.

 

[pcguy9441]

I ran speecy and all I get for the Gigabyte (garage system) mobo rev is x.xx. What's with that?

On my Asus board I get x.0x. How else can you get a rev# without examining the actual board?

 

[pcguy9441]

Will check dev mgr tomorrow, thanks. System in garage powered off.

Eric

 

[crjdriver]

If you want to know the ver# open the case and look. The version # should be silkscreened on the motherboard pcb; usually your manual will show exactly where to to look.
Do understand that win10 is NOT a supported operating system for your motherboard ie gigabyte did not waste time writing drivers for old hardware and put in the time for testing.

Just because it is not supported does not mean it will not work. It means it was never tested and the board mfg does not want to waste time/money on obsolete hardware. I have win10 running on an old asus 790fx chipset motherboard [no win10 support] it works fine with no issues however each case is different ie it might work fine and it might not work fine.

 

[flavallee]

I have a 8-9 year old Dell OptiPlex 780 minitower which installed and runs Windows 10 (version 1803) just fine.
It has an Intel Q45 chipset which has no downloadable driver for Windows 10.
Windows 10 automatically installed a driver for its Intel graphic and Analog Devices audio and Intel gigabit ethernet devices, and they all work fine.
I wanted to use it wireless, so I installed a Realtek dual band USB wireless adapter that supports Windows 10.
I also wanted a better graphic device, so I installed a GeForce GT 720 fanless graphic card.
It has an Intel Core 2 Duo E8600 3.33 GHz processor and 8 GB of DDR3 RAM, so its performance and speed are just fine for what I use it for.

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