Drivers For Ancient Pavilion Media Center M8430f?

[GHagen]

Gentlepersons, I recently picked up a HP Pavilion M8430f Media Center computer with four Gigs of RAM and an intel Core 2 Quad processor at a thrift store and I can't find any drivers for it from HP.

It shipped with Vista 64-bit and has Win8.1 on it now, but the installation is password protected so I can't use it as is.

I was thinking about Windows 7 64-bit since I have a lot of license keys for that. But where to get the drivers? I hate to resort to third party driver sites but I don't know whether I can fill all the driver "slots" with the native Win7 drivers and Windows update.

Windows 10 might be reaching a bit too far for an old machine like this, but I've read that many people can still free upgrades to 10 from 7.

What do you think my best option is for an OS upgrade and where do I get drivers that the OS and Windows update don't supply?

Thank you for your interest!

Grant

[Prométhée]

Hello

curiously, the specifications page is still present

https://support.hp.com/us-en/document/c01374052
this can be used for finding drivers, but you will not get the download page directly from hp
You will be more likely to find for windows 7
But it will be necessary to search everywhere
There are sites that reference a lot of hp computers with drivers, but not always secure.
There is a very good site which often works quite well you can test, despite a few errors sometimes, we manage to find many pilots, without too much difficulty

Trouver les drivers et pilotes en téléchargement, mise à jour PC

[GHagen]

Thank you for the response, Promethee, but that site is all in French, which doesn't do me any good.

I guess if I want to take the trouble to do the job properly (or as properly as I can under the circumstances) I'll have to catalog each piece of hardware and find out what drivers the manufacturer has and rely on Windows Update to fill in whatever I can't find. 

I don't really like the idea of downloading drivers from these free third party sites, even though what you get from some of them might be perfectly fine.

Suddenly the computer seems less of a bargain!

Grant

[Prométhée]

https://www.driverscloud.com/en/features

you can change the language
I know that one may not be a fan of this kind of website
I think twice in general
but this one has often helped me, that's why I suggest it, it's much more practical than looking everywhere
But it is clear that sometimes there are small errors, drivers, which do not suit
it's up to you to see if not, you will have to search on the NVIDIA, intel, realtek sites