System Installation-driver installation sequence

In the IT industry, technicians spread the saying: "The driver is not a program, but it is really terrible if it doesn't exist ". This fully demonstrates the importance of the driver. In today's ever-changing technological development, new hardware will be available every few days, and several months, or even 2 ~ The built-in driver library of the operating system that is updated once every three years (without Windows Update) cannot keep up with this development pace, which requires the manufacturer to continuously develop third-party drivers. To make your device work properly, you must install the correct driver for it. If you want to make it better, we need to install the driver more appropriately, better, and sequentially.
Let's assume a scenario-from a pure operating system, install drivers on each device gradually until all hardware works properly. In this way, you usually need to install the Motherboard chipset driver updates, IDE controller drivers, display card drivers, and sound card drivers, sometimes you also need to install DirectX and other extended API and operating system service upgrade packages (such as Windows 2000 Sevice Pack3 ). So how can we install it correctly? In addition to selecting the appropriate driver, the other key lies in the installation sequence. Using the correct sequence to install the driver not only improves the system performance, but also improves the system stability in the same hardware environment. In particular, the driver of the chipset should be installed first, because only after the driver is correctly installed can the operating system correctly identify some system devices, and other device drivers can be installed smoothly.

In the actual driver installation sequence, we can talk about the mainstream chipset drivers of Intel, VIA, SiS, and ALi Motherboard chipset vendors.

1. Intel
There is no doubt that Intel is the leader in the main board chipset and CPU field. The Motherboard chipset they developed works well with their own CPU, high Stability, few bugs, and good performance in all aspects. Due to the "Winter alliance", Microsoft's Windows operating systems always provide the best support for Intel chipset, therefore, there are almost no patches except for normal drivers. The following describes the correct installation sequence of the Intel 8xx chipset motherboard drivers (taking Windows 98SE as an example ).

Intel Chipset Softwre Installation Utility
Because Windows 98SE was launched earlier and cannot correctly identify Intel's current mainstream i8xx series chipset, you must first install this driver to ensure that the operating system can correctly identify system devices and use their functions. If the driver is not installed, the operating system will have no idea about the chipset and peripheral devices to be called, let alone the full performance. Take the display and graphics subsystems for example. If the Intel Chipset Software Installatiion Utility is not correctly installed, the serious consequence is that the AGP Bridge cannot be used. The AGP Bridge is integrated into the Memory Controller Hub of the chipset and serves as a Bridge between the motherboard and the card. If the AGP Bridge function is not enabled, even if the display card driver is correctly installed, the overall performance of the chart subsystem will be greatly reduced.

Intel Ultra ATA Storage Driver/Intel Application Accelerator
The Intel Ultra ATA Storage Driver is installed to enable the IDE controller to control and manage ATA 66/100 devices and their transmission specifications. In addition to allowing the operating system to correctly identify the 82801BA IDE controller, this control program is also the key to enabling the DMA (Direct Memory Access, Direct Memory Access) function in Windows 98SE. By default, the DMA transmission mode is disabled in Windwos 98SE, even if your IDE device supports the DMA transmission mode.

The Intel Application Accelerator (Intel Application Accelerator) has recently become popular. Intel said this Application Accelerator can be reduced by 10% ~ In addition to the system startup time of 20%, all applications can be accelerated by 5% ~ 10% execution efficiency (). As an enhanced IDE controller driver, it applies to ICH2 or an updated version of I/O Control HUB, and the chip is included in most i8xx chipset systems, that is, most users using Intel 8xx chipset boards can use it to improve system performance for free. In addition, users using the Pentium 4 system can get more benefits from this acceleration driver.

DirectX
Due to hardware updates, the current mainstream display cards support DirectX 7, DirectX 8, and even DirectX 9, while the DirectX6.1 attached to Windows 98SE obviously cannot make them fully functional. Because the display card driver is based on DirectX, you must install DirectX before the display card driver. Because a considerable number of newly purchased computers use 423 or 478-foot Pentium 4 CPUs, The SSE2 Instruction Set of the CPU can be well called only under DirectX 8; at the same time, the hardware acceleration of the GPU is also related to DirectX, so the installation of DirectX is also more exquisite.

Drivers for other devices
It should be noted that, in later Driver Installation (such as sound card ), some older drivers will overwrite some system files or EirectX files to the old version, which causes the device to fail to work normally (for example, after installing some older versions of the atigraphics card driver, some ACs' 97 sound cards cannot be voiced ). In this case, you should reinstall DirectX again.

2. VIA (Wei Sheng)
For a system using the VIA chipset, the basic installation process of the driver can also be roughly divided into three steps: Install the VIA 4 in 1 chipset patch first, and then DirectX; finally, the IDE interface controller driver and other device drivers. We also use the pure Windows 98SE as an example to illustrate this problem.

VIA 4 in 1
Knowledge
The VIA 4 in 1 Driver includes the IDE interface controller Driver that complies with the ATAPI interface specifications, The AGP VxD Driver (AGP interface Driver), The IRQ routing port Driver, and the via inf update. Because compatibility issues will increase with the increase of new products and performance optimization considerations, versions of VIA 4 in 1 are updated frequently, many compatibility and crash problems are often caused by the mismatch between the 4 in 1 driver and hardware.

It has been a long time since VIA (Weisheng) provided a 4 in 1 chipset driver for the motherboard Based on the VIA chipset. Microsoft usually only provides very limited support to third-party chipset vendors, so chipset manufacturers except Intel have to develop and release patches for their own products, and VIA is no exception. In addition to compatibility issues that may occur between the VIA chipset and the Windows operating system, this patch also enables Windows to correctly identify system devices integrated with the VIA chipset.

Typical Fault instance analysis
In the past, the VIA chipset always impressed people with poor compatibility. Such as poor compatibility with some special sound cards and video cards. in fact, these problems can be solved by installing the 4 in 1 driver or upgrading the motherboard BIOS. Therefore, the 4 in 1 drive of VIA is also called a "patch" of 4 in 1 ". Are these inherent problems still present on the VIA chipset motherboard?

Previously, when a sound card based on the Aureal 8820 sound chip (such as emeng S90) was installed on some boards using the VIA chipset, it crashed on Windows 98 desktop. This fault was once the best example of poor VIA compatibility. In fact, VIA has made some modifications to these compatibility issues. However, the VIA 4 in 1 driver still needs to be installed because it brings us a lot of performance gains. From the performance of the VIA 4 in 1 driver on Windows 98 platform, we can see that after the driver is installed, the performance of the motherboard has been fully utilized, especially in practical applications, the effect is more obvious, it seems that the VIA 4 in 1 driver does not exist only to solve the compatibility problem, but can actually improve our performance.

Since the compatibility problem of VIA has been fixed in the new chipset, can it be said that VIA 4 in 1 driver does not need to be installed in the chipset of? The answer is no. The driver still needs to be installed because it brings us a lot of performance improvements. It seems that the VIA 4 in 1 driver does not exist only to solve compatibility problems.

IDE controller driver
The IDE Miniport Driver and IDE Filter Driver of VIA are two IDE controller drivers developed by VIA, and the former must be separately installed. The IDE Miniport Driver is not installed with the 4 in 1 Driver by default. According to the official information of VIA, it is recommended to install in the following situations: 1. has a Zip drive, and the main board south bridge chip is 686B; 2. in the Windwos 2000 system, the ATA100 hard disk is used, and Service Pack 1 is not installed. 3. in Windwos 2000 and Windows XP, The atavel hard disk also supports any Windows operating system starting from Windows 98. The via ide Miniport Driver can cleverly correct the I/O error of the device. It can automatically decrease the Transmission Mode Level of the device from high to low to correct, the so-called transmission mode level is actually the UDMA 100, UDMA 66, UDMA, DMA, and PIO modes we often talk about. The via ide Filter Driver is a so-called Filter Driver. It is mainly used to determine the high/low layer of the system's conventional drivers and monitor the specific circumstances of the conventional drivers. The via ide Filter driver is supported by Windows 95/98/2000/me/XP and is the default installation driver for all Microsoft operating systems except NT.

DirectX
DirectX is more important than Intel for the VIA hardware platform.

3. SiS/ALi)
At present, an important driver for the system platform based on the SiS chipset is the SiS chipset driver package version 1.09, including the AGP driver and USB driver, and the just-released r1.01.07 version of the IDE driver. As we all know, the (Ultra DMA) pci ide driver has always been an indispensable driver in the operating system. The performance of the motherboard's IDE disk is determined by the IDE interface driver, after the SiS645 chipset was put on the market for such a long time, the corresponding IDE interface driver has not been released, and users can only use the IDE controller driver that comes with the operating system to work, this is a pity.

The integrated driver package of SiS has appeared in the IDE driver, but since the release of ipvf, the early IDE driver does not apply to the SiS961 nanqiao chip, there will be serious compatibility issues, so SiS removes it from the integrated driver package.

For ALi (yanzhi) chipset, the Driver to be installed is ALi Integrated Driver (Integrated Driver Toolkit) and ALi AGP Utility (AGP tool ), their latest versions are 1.07 and 1.40. The two chipset's integrated driver packages have integrated the majority of drivers that need to be installed. Therefore, you can install DixtctX before you install DixtctX. Other drivers can be installed later.

Fault Example
A Qilin (PCCHIP) M726 motherboard uses the ALi company's Aladdin Pro chipset (beiqiao chip is M1621, nanqiao chip is M1543C), with Intel celon 400 MHz PCU. After the system is restored through Ghost and the audio/video card driver software is installed, the boot speed is extremely slow and the desktop can be started in about 1 minute.

Analysis: This fault is caused by the absence of the ALi chipset driver package. After the driver package in the drive disc is installed, the boot speed is significantly faster, and it takes about 30 seconds to enter the desktop.

4. Other considerations
(1) For some older mainboards, update the BIOS to update the CPU microcode and fix bugs.
(2) We recommend that you disable unnecessary devices (such as serial ports and parallel ports that are not currently used) to increase the speed.
(3) For Windows NT, Windows 2000, and Windows