So I repaired my laptop this weekend and I tore down everything to the motherboard. For some reason, Windows freaked out and would no longer boot so I said to hell with it and booted up a Debian 9 ISO and installed it.

I'm curious to know if I am getting all the right software for my device now... Do I need any drivers? Where can I find drivers? Further, what should I look at to determine that my CPU is being utilized correctly and software is 100 % up to date?

-- Debian 9 AMD64 ISO
-- Dell M4600 Laptop w/ Core i7 and minicard SSD

I run Mint 18.2 amd 64 and have very few problems. GFX seem ok. Only issues are sleeping and hibernating they often don't wake up well. I used to use the fglrx graphics drivers and had fewer problems,but that's been super ceded.

A laptop that age ought not need any drivers not provided by Stretch, but depending on your needs, it's possible you'd do better to modify /etc/apt/sources.list to include non-free and/or follow the instructions on http://www.deb-multimedia.org and then 'apt update; apt upgrade'.

You know what?

Debian isn't a good distro for non production machines anyhow. I'm going to reconsider distros.