Windows 7 on old laptop drivers?

Hello guys, I was just about to buy a new laptop but I haven't found something that suits my needs that is available at this point where I live.

So while I'm waiting I want to get the best out of my current laptop. I have had it for five years now. It's a belinea/maxdata o.book 3.1. It's slow as hell but I thought a fresh windows install might help a lot.

I want to install windows 7 on it but the drivers cd was made for windows vista, what do I need to do to get the right drivers? Or should the vista drivers work too?

Tl;Dr will vista drivers work on windows 7?

 

Vista drivers will most likely work. I would be more concerned about the performance. Although Windows 7 is less resource heavy than Vista, they both have the same system requirements. You may want to consider a lighter OS though.

For now, any drivers that don't work from the CD, you should be able to get from the component manufacturer's site or other file hosting sites. Just make sure they're reputable, so you don't end up with malware or spyware, instead.

If you run into compatibility problems still, try running the setup utilities in compatibility mode.

 

I googled it for guite some time but I can only find some pretty obscure sites.

 

In my experience, Windows 7 has improved automatic driver detection and setup than Vista did, so you may not even need to manually install most of the provided drivers.

 

Thanks, so I could just run the setup and I should be fine?

Sorry didn't see your post at first, thank you very much.

Also my hard drive is pretty full right now, could that be a problem with a fresh install? My windows.old file won't get too big right?

I'm sorry for the noobish questions but i never did a fresh install before. Should i download the drivers beforehand and put them on a usb stick or could I do that after the fresh install?

 

For the drivers, both method works, but I prefer having them on a flash drive before doing the clean install.

 

No worries. We posted at nearly the exact same time, I noticed.

Doing a fresh install will not leave you with a .old directory. Unless you're talking about doing an upgrade and leaving your files intact, a "clean install" entails formatting the partition (or the whole drive) and starting with a clean slate; no drivers, no programs; nada!

As for your drivers, you are welcome to back up the ones you already have or download the ones you will need onto a flash drive, then do your clean install. After Windows is installed, you can use Device Manager and the "Update Driver Software..." to manually install your drivers, or you can run the respective setup utilities.

And as Midnight Sun pointed out: Windows Update is liable to find some hardware drivers for you automatically as well.

 

Thanks a lot guys for the help! I'll pop a gb of extra ram in it and a fresh install will hopefully make things go faster so I can give it to my sister later on when I get a new laptop in a few weeks.