You never know when disaster may strike, resulting in you having to re-install some or all of your Windows setup. This can leave you without drivers for crucial components, and there's a good chance you won't be able to connect to the internet to download them.

To avoid this situation, you should visit. Driverpacks is an open-source project that aims to provide a local copy of all the drivers XP will need. On the site you'll see listed a number of downloads under the headings Chip set, CPU, Graphics, Lan, Mass Storage, Sound and Wlan. You'll need to download all the files into an empty directory on your hard disk. The total downioad siz'e should be about 336MB and all the files will end with the extension. 7z. They can be decompressed using the 7-zip program.

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Once you've downloaded and decompressed all 10 packs, you should move the compressed files you downloaded out of the directory to a safe location. You can then copy the remaining extracted directories and their contents to a 2GB or larger memory key, or burn them to a DVD.

You can use these drivers whenever you have to reinstall or repair a Windows XP installation, so it's worth keeping sufficient backup copies of these driver discs to cover you in all eventualities. whts more, on page 34 we'll show how to incorporate these drives into a specially customized Xp installation disc. you can also find windows drivers at the microsoft update catalog