If you own a Dell computer or laptop, it is safe to say that at some point in time, you will need to get drivers for the hardware. Maybe you’ve had to perform a fresh load of the operating system and you’ve misplaced your driver disc or maybe your hardware is running poorly and you’re hoping the latest drivers will fix your problem. A friend of mine ran into this a few days ago, but he got a little lost in how to accomplish this. Dell didn’t really help things by not giving direct access to the downloads from the homepage. Here’s what you do:
- Go to Dell’s homepage.
- From the menu at the top, select My Account (don’t worry that you don’t have one).
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- Select the Support tab from the top of the page.
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- Under Choose a Support Option, click the Drivers and Downloads link (or icon).
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- From the Select Your Product Model section, you have two way of specifying your system, Select Model and Enter a Tag.
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Select Model will take you through a series of options to specify your computer. You have to designate whether its a desktop or a notebook, then the product line, and finally the model.
Enter a Tag makes things much simpler. Just input your service tag into the textbox and click Go. Your service tag is located on the bottom of your notebook or on the side or back of your desktop.
- Once you specified the model, it’s time to narrow down the search criteria. You need to specify the Operating System of the computer and the Driver Language. You can also use the Category and Importance dropdowns to narrow your result list.
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- Below the criteria selection, you will find a list of items with a count of how many files each one contains.
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Click the + next to the desired item to expand it and reveal the desired drivers.
- You can download the desired driver at this time, or, if you are looking for more than one driver, you can select Add To My Downloads.
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Using Add To My Downloads allows you to build a single page of links to the desired drivers. When you have finished selecting your drivers, click the View and Edit Your List link on the right side of the page.
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It will take you to your Downloads List, where you can download each selected driver.
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- Once you have downloaded the desired executable(s) from the Dell site, run it. Follow the prompts and the drivers will be installed on your computer.
