Driver / VM Question

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kosmo

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The desktop machine i'm wanting change from W7 to W10 is a Dell Opti3020. It was discontinued before ever getting W10 so there are no official W10 drivers for it. I've been going back & forth on how to best approach this issue and decided yesterday to build an unmodified ISO - except for including all of my (roadtested) w7 x64 drivers (inf's not exe's) to see which would work and which i'd have to find upgrades for.

So I built the ISO and ran it on my copy of VM Player 15 (last W7 ver - no "Tools"). And it loaded up just fine - ignoring all of my included W7 drivers. Now I suspect i'm exposing my profound ignorance of VM's here - but I did attempt to search this question online and here in the forum and came up empty-handed. At this point i'm assuming that the VM is abstracting (?) the hdwr from the OS it's running? But even so why did it completely ignore my W7 drivers?

So 2 questions:
-- Is it, in fact, completely pointless to test drivers in the VM? Or did I just screw it up?

-- And, as a practical matter, is it likely to be quicker / easier to install this to the computer with the W7 drivers integrated and see what didn't work or add no drivers and see what doesn't work or work well enough on the machine with the M$ generic drivers? Or is it a crapshoot?
 
Windows will only load the HW drivers for which it can identify the HW ID's as being present. An offline or installed image may contain many drivers which are never loaded, because they don't match any HW on the system. This is the reason some users choose to strip the default drivers out of Windows, to reduce the on-disk space taken up by non-applicable drivers.

VM's like VMware or VirtualBox are Type 2 hypervisors, so they only emulate a "generic PC". If you install the guest OS extensions, then you get enhanced HW support passed through the VM platform's native Windows drivers.

Only a Type 1 hypervisor (Hyper-V, QEMU) can pass thru bare metal HW that can be recognized by a VM.

You can never use VMware or VirtualBox to test HW support. For real-world driver testing, you always need a physical PC.
 
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