Windows 7 Drivers fail at startup

[Taters343]

My laptop has been working fine for two or three months now, until today when I restarted it and suddenly could no longer use my USB mouse. Then I realized I had no WiFi signal, so I plugged into ethernet, and still had no internet connection. Most of my drivers seem to be broken, with my laptop functioning only as it would after freshly installing Windows, before actually installing any drivers.

I managed to eventually find a way to install the WiFi drivers, and then the rest of the missing drivers, and restarted my computer to make sure everything was fine. The exact same thing happened again. Any idea what is wrong and how I can fix it without doing a fresh install? I don't currently have access to my backup drives so I'd lose a lot of stuff if I had to reinstall Windows.

 

[Taters343]

Ok, so it seems like I've managed to fix it. I'll do a step by step guide of what I did, in case anyone wanders into this thread with the same problem. All you need to do is uninstall the devices that aren't working, then restart the system. To do that follow these steps:

1. Go to Start > Right click on Computer and click Manage
2. Select Device Manager in the menu on the left.
3. Find each device that isn't working properly and right click, then choose Uninstall.
4. Restart your computer, hopefully everything works.

 

[Taters343]

I've had to use the above solution multiple times, which obviously means it is only a temporary fix. If anyone else wants to take a crack at it, I'd be willing to try any reasonable ideas.