Installed new HD with Win7, download issues

Hi folks: Haven't seen my particular problem here, so if I'm duplicating, I apologize. Just point me to the right thread. ;-)
OK. I made the HORRIBLE mistake of buying an Acer Aspire M5800 Desktop 2 years ago from Fryes. The video card went out in 6 months, and rather than shipping the whole unit to Texas, I bit the bullet and installed a new vid card. Then, about 14 months along, the hard drive started making this horrid clicking noise and would not boot up. Of course I didn't have any startup or recovery disks (because Acer are cheap bastards) so used my work laptop to burn a recovery disk from an image. This worked fine and we were able to get back into the system, but I knew that the HD was on borrowed time. I finally bought a new Seagate 1TB SATA internal hard drive, installed it, and installed Win 7 onto it (because of course, not having the original disks, I wasn't able to install Vista onto it - nor did I want to, honestly.)
OK. So I can access the new drive from bootup (the system asks which OS I want to run, Vista or Win7?) and I can copy files from the old disk to the new one. My problem is: How do I get the new HD to recognize the video card, sound card, etc. Also, when trying to download files from IE 9, they invariably get hung up.
Any help you can offer will be greatly appreciated!!

 

Hi Metalhed,

Im struggleing to follow the course you have taken here. Why are you being ased which OS to book to? if you have a new drive then Vista should not be on there and you should boot straight to w7?

When you install a new OS the OS will first boot using standard, generic VGA adapter driver. It will then atempt to recognise the card and either install the driver from its own driver library or download it from the vendor site (Note this applies to win7 not vista). It will do the same for all hardware but if it cant find the driver then you will have to manually download it from the vendor website.

 

You are lucky , go here

http://support.acer.com/us/en/product/default.aspx?modelId=1158

selecting operating system from right side of the page , download the drivers you need !! :wave

 

I wonder how you got into a dual boot setup in the first place?:confused You still have your old drive in there?

 

Yes, the old drive has a bunch of stuff that I want to pull off and since it still works (barely) I thought I'd keep it there til it finally crashed. I've set the admin to share for both drives and can pull back & forth. The problem is downloading at this point, so I imagine I need to upgrade drivers or something. I'll check out the Microsoft page & see if there's any support there. Thanks for your help!

 

Yep. My issue now is trying to get downloads to work, the IE9 keeps getting interrupted.

 

And just to make it even weirder...I loaded the setup for iTunes from the old drive into the new - and the downloads are BLAZING fast. ??? So now I'm going to try loading Mozilla & see if that makes a difference. What a long, strange trip it's been...and no sign of relief in sight???

 

In case anyone's interested...I installed Firefox and haven't had a lick of trouble since. I think the issue was IE9. I'm not inclined to go back. Screw you, Microsoft!

 

There's obviously a block somewhere but I don't have clue one on how. Glad that you got FF going.

 

OK, now the same issue has occurred with FF. Can't download videos...but at least I'm getting an error message - "dns misconfiguration." WTF? I have NO idea what that means. Any ideas? LOL so I uploaded Chrome and am working from that. Next I'll get IE7 from the old computer!!! Oh yeah, was going to ask - can one remove IE from the computer? I tried in 'control panel' but it wouldn't let me. Thanks again for listening.

 

DNS = Domain Name Server.

It translates the www.webaddress.com to the ip address of the server hosting the page.

The DNS location is usually stored on your router but it can be over riden on the local PC. Malware can exploit this to hijack pages but I doubt this is the problem in your case

use ipconfig /all from comand prompt to confirm your settings list your default gateway and dns address (they may be the same)

 

Problem solved-I uninstalled IE9 and have been able to watch my favorite Youtube show for about a half hour now. DICK FIGURES from Mondo Media Mini Shows RULE!!!! LOL. Thanks to everyone who responded-you got me thinking in different angles and that helped a LOT.