Hello my forum friends!

I just formatted an old 80gb Hard Disk Drive and installed windows xp on an old Hp Pavilion 541c. I found all the necessary motherboard drivers, the video card drivers, the moniter drivers too.

Heres my question: Is it necessary to find the correct drivers for my HDD? How about my mouse and keyboard? I know that my cd/dvd player requires the drivers to watch dvds, and I know that default drivers probably don't perform as well.

My main concern is the harddrive and my cd player: Will it hurt them if they are running on generic drivers?

I ask this because so far everything seems to be running just fine, although I did have a small stutter when i was typing (I typed but some of letters didn't carry through), but as of now there is absolutely no stutter.

I'm being lazy and because of it, I'm reluctant to open my case (AGAIN) just to look at my hard-disk for the brandname...

There's no need for keyboard drivers if you don't have special function keys that are not working properly. Same thing goes for the mouse. If the CD drive is recognized and working in Windows Explorer (or My Computer) there's no need to worry about it.

An HDD driver is only needed if you have SATA or RAID and you would've been asked for it BEFORE being able to install the OS. Since you're past that stage, no need to worry.

The stutter you saw immediately after installing Windows was probably caused by Automatic Updates running like crazy in the background and installing... well Windows updates. If it happens again, start Task Manager and check you CPU/memory utilization. Most likely the CPU will be close to 100%.

Excellent! Now I'm satisfied and worry-free! Thanks for the help buddy!