How to reinstall windows without having to reinstall drivers?

Ok so I just purchased an XPS m1330. So i gotta give my dad his nice dell workstation back. It definitely needs a refreshing after all the crap i put that computer through. On the other hand I don't feel like reinstalling the drivers...Any suggestions? What is the best way to refresh/reinstall windows without having to reinstall those drivers or doing a complete reformat?

 

No, you cant do that. A simple repair reinstall is the only way you can reinstall Windows without reinstalling drivers, but that wont change anything, all the “crap” will still be there . Or you can restore the system to the factory installed state (using the dell recovery partition : I think it comes with almost all DELL computers), that will have all the drivers but it will also have all the bloatware and trial ware came originally with the PC. For best performance, do a clean installation.

Installing drivers is very simple and wont take time (compared to installing all the other applications like office suits, media players, utilities etc..), just use the driver disk or get them from support.dell.com.

 

Without any driver your computer will be unusable. Windows installs certain basic drivers so that you will be able to use your computer after installation. This is true with clean installation too.

 

Umm you can always slipstream the drivers into the XP installation CD using nlite. That way, when you install the OS, you also install all the drives also.

 

^Which is just as complicated as installing drivers, and I believe the OP is trying to avoid complications.

 

i think pc restore is my best option..my dad needs the computer clean and I can remove the bloatware myself...ctr-f11 during start up right?

 

Even if you uninstall bloatware, your registry is still full of crap. It's going to be faster to install drivers. Really easy since Dell has all of them.

 

Yes, installing the drivers is very easy. Driver download section of support.dell.com is well organized. You can quickly find what you need, then simply download and run each driver executable. Or use the driver CD. Won’t take more than 10 minutes to install all the drivers (even most of that time taken for downloading and restarting )

Much MUCH easier, quicker and better than uninstalling bloatware from a restored installation.

 

drivermax, driver magician are the few that would assist u in backing up drivers and use them later after a fresh install w/o searching about

cheers ...

 

Damn you're lazy I install 2 new drivers from Nvidia every week

 

Yeah. Driver install is probably the easiest part of a clean reinstall. Everything else is what takes so long.

 

lol...last time i reformatted the dell technician made a whole big deal about the order I needed to install the drivers in so I did not want to call them to remind me...Anyway I on my new m1330 now so I will ignore the other computer for a few days now..

 

The order is not critical, but generally better to install chipset drivers first, then VGA, sound, LAN and other device drivers and finally DELL utility apps and normal apps. Also running Windows update as soon as you can (before installing applications) is a good idea.

Usually I run it even before installing drivers.