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Driver installation order is one of the most crucial issues when talking about overall platform performance. This is especially true for Intel® chipsets. Drivers should always be installed in the order displayed in Table 1 below. The most critical step in the installation order is to install the Intel® Chipset Software Installation Utility (INF) first before all other drivers. Once the Intel Chipset Software Installation Utility is properly installed device driver installation order becomes less crucial and will have less impact on system performance.
In all cases, it is advised that a clean operating system load be performed before conducting these driver installations.
Table 1: Installation & Configuration Order
| Order |
|
| 1 |
Fresh Operating System Installation |
| 2 |
Latest Service Pack or Patch |
| 3 |
Intel® Chipset Software Installation Utility (INF Utility) |
| 4 |
All other device drivers |
| 5 |
Intel® Application Accelerator if needed |
| 6 |
Microsoft* DirectX* 8.0 or higher | |
Driver Description
- Intel® Chipset Software Installation Utility (INF)
The Intel® Chipset Software Installation Utility (INF) is a driver that enables many features of the Intel chipset that are built into your Intel® desktop board. This utility must be installed FIRST in order for the operating system to accurately use the features built into the chipset. If this utility is not installed, the operating system will not know what chipset features exist. Peripherals added may, in most cases, not run to full potential. This is especially true with graphics performance.
- Intel® Application Accelerator (IAA)
This driver provides all the features of the Intel Ultra ATA Storage Driver, plus Windows* XP support and includes faster boot time via accelerated operating system load time. This driver also enhances disk I/O for games, graphic applications, disk utilities, and media authoring applications. On Intel® Pentium® 4 processor based systems, this driver provides a performance enhancing data pre-fetcher. The Intel® Application Accelerator also provides support for 137GB and larger IDE hard drives.
- DirectX* 8.0
DirectX is the next driver that will need to be loaded. DirectX* 8.0 or higher recommended*.
This applies to:
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