advice and help wanted - new lap top hard drive
 

Hi,

Hoping that some of the local IT experts on here will be able to offer me some advice.

My hard drive crashed in my lap top big style, no use at all so can not copy any software of it. I've now sourced and fitted a new hard drive. Loaded Windows XP on to it, but, when I plug a printer in to the USB port it does not seem to recognise it. Do I need to install USB drivers ? if so what other drivers will I need to load up ?

Any advice where to find the relevant soft ware ? is it a case of visiting the manufacturers web site ?

I have a second lap top that is working OK, but, I want to swap the hard drive on that. Is it possible to copy the USB drivers and any others to a CD before I swap the hard drive, or do I just fit a new one and download all the necessary software.

Thanks for any advice.

XP has usb drivers already in it loaded by default. The normal practice with a printer is to download, install the drivers and then plug in the printer. Just go to the printer manufacturer's website for them.

As for the 2nd laptop...best thing to do is pull the drive, fit a new one, reload Windows etc. Keep the old hard drive and everything on it as a spare drive that you can simply plug in.

Don't try swapping drives with working installations on them between different machines. They'll just cause blue screens of death and crashes.

It's not the printer drivers I'm having problems with. It seems as though there are no drivers in XP for the USB ports.

I could be wrong.

If XP is not detecting your USB ports then either they are turned off in the bios (not likely with laptop bios - you can do this on some desktops though) or your usb ports are goosed. When installing or booting XP is always does a check for new hardware and should automatically load the drivers or prompt you for a drivers disk. In the case of XP it could feasibly ask you to pop the XP installation disk in for them if it didn't load them as part of the o/s in the first place.