Laptops are notorious for having devices that a generic Windows disk doesn't recognize. It's a major drag to dig up these drivers even for people who are computer "nerds".
So the laptop manufacturer supplies a "recovery disk" that lets you reinstall windows and the drivers, putting the laptop back just like when it came out of the box. No help if you've lost that disk though. One thing you can try is to see if there's a hidden partition on your hard drive with the original installation files on it. This is a pretty common trick for "brand name" computers. If there is, you may be able to make the partition visible using Partition magic ($$) or Gparted (free) and point the driver update wizard at the .cab files in there. No guarantees here, but it might work. You can look at the partitions in XP - search for "partition" in "help and support", click the "mark a partition as active" topic and expand the "using the Windows interface" heading to see how to open the disk management console. You'll see a graph of your hard drive with the partitions shown. There are ways to hide a partition from here - check in Device Manager for the total size in gigabytes of your drive, then see if the total of all the partition sizes you see (probably one or two) is close to the device manager reported size of the drive. Remember that if you look at the drive label itself the numbers won't add up, the label thinks one gB is 1,000,000,000 bytes, the computer counts one gB as 1,073,741,824 bytes: a 100gB drive as indicated on its label is only 93gB to the computer.
