You might get discs from your hardware manufacturer with drivers

but equally you might not. However, the manufacturers make their drivers available on the internet, for nothing.

Yes, things should "just work" within reason. For example, your DVD drive and graphics card. DVD is a fixed format, something that you can build a "good enough" generic driver for, which will work for 99% of hardware. Same with graphics cards - the chipset manufacturers supply microsoft with generic drivers, and they're bundled with windows. So up to a point, things will "just work".

So if you've got some funky nVidea graphics card with its own RAM and CPU, without the specialised nVidia drivers, it'll work, just about, but it probably won't do all the high end fancy stuff it's capable of, high resolutions, shading, 3d accelleration, etc. But if you install the nVidia driver "over the top" then they'll replace the generic drivers.

Posted By: Arizona Bay, Nov 28, 15:03:11