The Problem with Old Hardware: Drivers Are Getting Harder and Harder to Find

[Tsing]

Intel's recent decision to remove legacy drivers from its website has reignited a concern among enthusiasts who have made a hobby out of collecting and running older hardware. As pointed out by Motherboard, finding drivers for vintage gear is becoming a frustrating endeavor that often requires scouring archived pages, such as those hosted by Internet Archive. The planned deprecation of FTP sites (a once-popular dumping ground for drivers and software) by popular browsers won't help matters, either.

Realizing that this would be an issue, Scott had the Archive Team save whatever they could from public FTP sites a few years back into a section of the Internet Archive called the FTP Site Boneyard—one FTP site getting the treatment was Intel’s, which has an archive dating to 2014. That’s great news for folks who have devices from before then, though it’s not exactly solace for what comes after. And the motivation for companies to make an effort to simply keep consumer drivers available may simply not be in a forward-thinking company’s DNA.

 

[s3thra]

After building a few old systems and getting them up and running on Windows 98/2000/XP, I have found getting old ATI/AMD and Nvidia drivers on their respective websites to be pretty easy. Tracking other things down in the Vogons community is usually a pretty good place for more obscure things.

Other times it's just been sheer luck that I've been able to find old chipset drivers or motherboard manuals hosted on obscure websites around the web.

It's good though there seems to be efforts to archive the Intel drivers on archive.org so they aren't lost forever. It's a treasure trove of goodness.

 

[magoo]

My biggest challenge has been finding sound drivers for Azuentek XFi Forte.
I really like this soundcard, but W10 drivers are hard to find if at all.
Especially since update 1903.