Record hardware device info before re-installing OS

hi guys,

For my own purpose of searching for a laptop that's most compatible with Win2000/XP drivers I had come across quite a few posts on this forum where people had replaced Vista with XP/Linux on their laptops and ended up not knowing what the specific devices were before they replaced the entire partitions, e.g., sound, LAN, wirelss, VGA...etc so it becomes a headache to find out what the devices are to locate the correct drivers for them.

I just wanted to remind everyone to record the exact spec of your laptop devices while you still have a functional Vista OS before you attempt to replace it with XP or Linux, that way at least you can use the spec to search for drivers if the install doesn't recognize it.

For me, in addition to taking screenshots of the device manager windows, I also use two excellent utilities to obtain complete device details :

CPU ID
PC Wizard

That's all I wanted to share with you, hope you guys find it useful. Now please look at my thread and offer ideas if you have any :
Laptop to run Win2000 or XP ? (Drivers availability)

 

bit of a no brainer really!

 

Yeah, but I'll bet there are a lot of 'Help I need a driver for...' posts that wouldn't be there if it weren't for the 'no brainers'...