2nd Hand Laptop, how to find out which drivers

3503 Views 4 Replies 3 Participants Last post by amdfanboy, Jul 3, 2008

billermo

Discussion Starter · Nov 24, 2007

I have been given a 2nd hand Toshiba Dynabook laptop. Model no. seems to be EX1/524CDE, and I'm pretty sure it's from Japan.

Now I can see it has a Windows XP sticker on it, but apparently Vista is on here.

It won't start. It gets as far as the black setup screen which gives the option for Normal Windows, Safe Modes, etc. and goes in a circle up to that point only.

What I would like to do is get it working again using XP (not Vista), and also need to figure out which drivers it will need.

My worry is that since it's from Japan, it may mean going to some all-Japanese website or customer service site to get that information again. I hope not. Actualy after doing a good bit of Googling, I can't find anything remotely helpful. I don't see any info at all on this model in English.

I don't have any of the specs for it, so no idea which video card, sound card, etc. that it has on it.

Am I looking at a hell of a lot of work to get this thing up and running?

Any help or information on this problem would be very appreciated.

Thanks

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billermo

Discussion Starter · #3 · Nov 24, 2007

It looks like it's not that simple. This appears to be a model that isn't available in the US or outside Japan, at least not under the name and model number it has. The American Toshiba site doesn't even allow you to contact anyone, just select from dropdown menus, and if your model isn't listed there in the dropdown, you're out of luck.

If I go in through the Toshiba Japan site, I eventually reach a page that tells me there's no assistance available other than in Japanese.

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billermo

Discussion Starter · #4 · Nov 25, 2007

OK after further searching, I did manage to find a page that gives the BIOS drivers for 'all Dynabook laptops', but that is all. I once needed to do this with a Dell laptop that I needed to reinstall XP on, and when I did that there were lots of drivers that needed to be installed, what seemed like much more than just these BIOS drivers Toshiba offers. Graphics card driver, sound card driver, networking driver, and some others I can't remember now. Toshiba doesn't appear to have anything close to the online customer support that Dell does. Actually, when I got the information from Dell, it wasn't clear where on the website I would have found it, and only by contacting a person at customer service (chat) was I able to get the links to all the drivers.

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