What is a Windows driver?

What is a Windows driver?

Drivers are software that connects your computer with hardware devices. Without drivers, the devices you connect to your computer, for example, a printer or video card won't work properly.

Keeping your drivers updated is very crucial to ensure that all your hardware devices work correctly, when you first time connect your device to computer; Windows will try to find a default driver for the device. It may or may not work. But even the default one works, usually it cannot work at its full performance, or worse, the device will simply not work if Windows fail to find its driver.

Why do I need to update drivers?

To understand why keep your drivers updated is important, you need to know what are drivers and what can they do.

The answer is simple. Windows need device drivers to communicate with hardware devices. Without drivers, your system can not speak to devices, such as video card, audio card. Drivers are the bridge between OS and hardware. They are essential to keep computer working well.

Traditional drivers are more like hardware’s, but nowadays they have more and more features. For example, a video driver usually includes a control utility, in which you can adjust screen resolution, colours.

So, why we need keep drivers up to date? It’s the same reason that we need keep Windows system and software’s updated. Generally the latest drivers include these merits:

·         Fix the bugs in the earlier version

·         Improve performance, so the hardware’s can work faster and steadier.

·         Add more features. You may discover new functions which do not exist in old drivers.

If your computer is experiencing some troubles, the first thing to do is to make sure there are no unknown devices in your driver manager and all of your drivers is updated. Driver issues caused by old drivers always are very hard to track down and you certainly do not want waste time on that.

How to install a driver manually?

First of all, you need download the latest drivers file.

If it is a executive file, you can install it by simply double clicking the file.

If it is a zip file and you cannot find a installer in the archive, you can install the driver by following instruments below:

·         Go to Control Panel and open Device Manager.

·         Find the device that you are trying to install a driver

·         Right click the device and select properties.

·         Select Driver tab, then click the Update Driver button.

·         Choose Browse my computer for driver software.

·         Let me pick from a list of device drivers on my computer

·         Browse for the .inf driver file. Open and Next.

·         The driver will be installed.