Driver question

[copiman]

First off, let me say I am a student learning computers. This morning I had a conversation with a fellow student. I told him I wiped a hard drive and installed windows 7 only. After booting up, I could not access the internet. I told him that I needed to load the nic driver from the manufactures website in order to get to the internet. He said when he did it, he did not have to load a driver. I then told him that I believe the driver is stored on the hard drive. Am I right or am I wrong?

 

[Celegorm]

You are right, but some devices are/were popular enough where working drivers were included in the windows 7 install

 

[copiman]

Thank you for responding. I thought I was right. I will see him today. We will be focusing on back ups today at my house. Need to learn (hands on) backing up before working on them. Thanks again.