So my cousin bought a computer from the estate of one of his mothers friends. Dual core 64 bit processors, 4 gigs of ram, Nvidia graphics, etc, etc… state of the art for back then and extremely pricey. Some relative of the previous owner took the computer to remove all the personal information from it before it was sold by the estate.

He wiped everything, and I do mean everything, every program, and almost every single driver. I found that out yesterday when he had me try to connect it to the internet. No modem drivers, no ethernet drivers, device manager was mostly just a long line of yellow question marks with generic “PCI Device” or whatever after them.

I took it home last night and tracked down the missing drivers, burned them to disc, and installed them successfully after a bit of trial and error over the installation order. Once I got it online no problems at all, not one failed update or program install, and the thing is fast, 10 times faster than his existing computer and almost as fast as my newest windows 7 machine.

One problem, I’m still missing every single factory installed program, I have downloaded and replaced pretty much everything except of course for Word/Office, now I’m stuck. The manufacturer says they cannot sell me back-up discs for the original programs since the warranty is expired. God knows where the original back-up discs are, probably in a landfill somewhere, so I have a perfectly working fast computer to return to my cousin but with absolutely no word processing programs installed…sigh. :(

Any suggestions?