Upgrading Dell laptop from Vista to Win 7; how to find drivers?

[astrum3]

Want to clean install Win 7 on beloved Dell D830 which had Vista. My D830 has 1.8 GHz processor, 2 gig RAM, 120 gig hard drive, Intel Media Accelerator X3100. I know all the drivers needed for Vista, but how do I identify the ones for Win 7? (Dell site doesn't show for Win 7) Got Dell XPS 17 with Win 7 and laptop is a piece of junk. Now switched to Macbk Pro (Yuck) but desperately want to save my D830 which was top hardware but with unfortunately lousy software (Vista). Grateful for any help.

 

[Alabalcho]

Go to Dell' support site, enter your laptop' service tag, and you will see whether Dell has released drivers for Windows 7.

Option two: Bite the bullet, and go ahead. If you have chance, Windows 7 will find it's drivers (you might need to connect to Internet using wired connection first). If not, you might try Vista drivers as well.

 

[astrum3]

thank you. Should have mentioned Dell has no Win 7 drivers for my model. But maybe like you say, Vista drivers might work; I accidentally loaded Win 7 on it without doing a clean install, and everything looked normal except it was as slow as the previous Vista. again, thank you so much.

 

[Alabalcho]

In-place upgrade of bloated Vista to Windows 7 will not remove the bloat, so your result is more or less expected.

Backup whatever important you have on that laptop, and install clean Windows 7.

And yes. D830 was a great laptop (I had 820). Back in 2007 or 2008, when it was released. So, don't expect magic.