this post was submitted on 16 Mar 2024
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From what I got online that computer has either an Intel or MediaTek PCIe Wifi card, both of them should be supported out of the box by Windows. Also you aren't required to install GPU drivers manually, just run Windows Update and it will pull the driver including the Nvidia panel for you.
Because it is as long as you don't fuck things up because you think you know better. Just use Windows update to pull GPU drivers... or download what Acer says is for your computer on their support page... cheap ass hardware that shouldn't even be on the market doesn't help either.
Yes it does grab the right things without fail. Hardware identification is trivial at this point, all have their IDs.
Yes, I remember those times, but we're past that.
Nowadays it is usually better to let Windows grab drivers for you because it will grab the driver and no other extra crap. A lot of devices come with useless bundled software and Microsoft is very strict when it comes to installing software with the drivers - they only do it for GPUs, sound cards and a couple exceptions - guess that Microsoft now wants an monopoly on who can install crapware in your system as well :P
There are a few exceptions to this, special hardware that isn't properly registered on the Windows Update catalog and Windows won't pull drivers, for those cases people should head into the support page of their device and download drivers from there. Some brands may also make this easier, for instance HP has a tool that will detect your machine model and download and install the required drivers.
It's actually worse! Last jan Microsoft bricked the entire fleet of laptops in my company with a borked generic driver update. It overwrote the sd reader's vendor driver blocking all storage access from working whatsoever. From one week to another more or less all devices refused to boot. They basically killed our entire company for half a week, until IT could walk people through efi-disabling the sd reader in every laptop (recent industrial models mind you) just because windows had pulled in the wrong driver. So... no - it's not great at all with automatic driver installation in windows ...