DriverPacks.net

The Team

Still to be written :)

APIs

If you're a developer and you're interested in integrating the DriverPacks with your application — whether that be a commercial or free, open source or closed source application — feel free to contact us for more information. We haven't found the time yet to publish all this on the web site, but we will as soon as we can.

We can provide you with access via any file format (INI, XML, JSON, RSS, ATOM, …) to the details of each DriverPack, to make your desktop or web application take advantage of DriverPacks.net's massive database of drivers.
For now, however, we only provide the release metadata in INI format. Just append /metadata.ini to any DriverPack URL. E.g.: http://driverpacks.net/driverpacks/windows/xp/x86/wlan/12.02 becomes http://driverpacks.net/driverpacks/windows/xp/x86/wlan/12.02/metadata.ini

Brief history

The "I" in the story below is Wim Leers, known at that time under the nickname Bâshrat the Sneaky. It also only applies to the Windows XP DriverPacks. Where the story ends, the work has been continued by the DriverPacks Team.

I've started these DriverPacks because I wanted to achieve a Uniform UXPCD. Why in the world would you want support for all available hardware, I hear you thinking. Well, that's easy to explain: to be able to use these unattended Windows XP installation CD's on any computer (of course one that's capable of running Windows XP).

So in that thread at MSFN.org I asked how I could do that. Of course people were laughing at me (a quote: "I think you'd be naive to think you'd be able to fit the (latest) drivers of every device made since XP was launched, on the one cd").

After a while I decided to just try it, and I started DriverPack Sound. It was a hell to get it fully working, but the positive feedback kept me continuing. Later DriverPack LAN was added and also DriverPack MassStorage (this last one was started by RyanVM). In January '05 I released DriverPack WLAN, which contains about 250 drivers (at that time)! This one has without a doubt the largest collection until now. In February, DriverPack Graphics has become available. This one has been split into three parts: A, B and C. DriverPack Graphics A supports the ATI Radeon series and the nVidia GeForce and GeForce Go series (current low-, mid- and high- end GPU's), while DP Graphics B supports the older and rather exotic graphics cards. DriverPack Graphics C contains the drivers for the professional GPUs: ATI's and nVidia's Quadro series. DriverPack Chipset has also been added to the list! DriverPack Sound has also been split into two parts (A and B) because of its size. DriverPack CPU, a tiny DriverPack, contains the AMD K8 CPU drivers. This (nearly) completes the circle: all important device drivers are now available in the form of DriverPacks!

Each of these DriverPacks support the widest variety of controllers in their category: even brands of whom you've never heard are included! At the moment there is support for hundreds of devices (Chipset, Graphics (A, B and C), LAN, MassStorage, Sound (A and B) and WLAN).

Userbars

We do have our own DriverPacks.net userbars, you can find all of them on our Userbars page