Drivers then Hardware?

[heuristic]

Hi everyone,

Finally got my PCI424 card and my 24io and am quite happy, well, at least up until XP croaked on me last Friday. I did a search on this forum but could not find an answer to my specific question, so here goes.

I reinstalled XP (clean install, all updates, blah blah) but then I remembered the instructions on driver installation for this card "recommend" you install the drivers before installing the card. So, foolishly, I tried to reinstall the drivers while the card was still sitting in the PCI slot... and it seems to fail during the install and I get a message about the package being possibly corrupted.

So tonight I will pull the card and do it the "recommended" way. I guess what I really want to know is why???? Its a bit of a pain to extract the machine from its location and pull the card just for this.

Thanks in advance, I am sure this is old hat to most of you...

I am considering now the switch to Windows 7, is this behaviour the same with that OS?

regards - Robin

[heuristic]

Accckkk! Just found the other thread about this!

Sorry Folks! Its a driver issue. Still it would be nice to know WHY the drivers need to be installed before the hardware each time!