February 4, 2003

Time for a driving lesson. What are those pesky drivers everything gets blamed on? What do they do, and why should I care? Well, drivers are at the heart of everything in your computer working correctly, so I'll attempt to clear up some of the confusion on what drivers actually do.

Drivers are how your computer can communicate with your hardware devices. For example, let's take a printer. In the "old DOS days", when you wanted to print a letter, the computer would send codes to the printer telling it what font, what color, what size, spacing, etc. Lots of codes were sent to the printer in order for it to print your letter. For anyone who remembers the DOS version of Word Perfect, it had a function where you could view a lot of the codes imbedded in the document used to tell the printer what to do.

Today is no different, the only difference is Windows is doing all the instruction. The drivers are the end of the line for sending the instructions to the printer to make it print the letter correctly. Drivers should be forever, right? Wrong, many times when software, or particularly operating system changes are made, the drivers need to be changed to make the new software communicate with your hardware. Many times it takes a few tries before the drivers are correct or have the majority of bugs removed. This is why it is so important to check occasionally to see if there are any updated drivers for the hardware on your computer. Again, here is another reason I like Dell and Gateway. Checking these issues is very simple since, all you do is, go to their support web site, put in your serial number, and you will have all the information on what drivers are available.

Almost every piece of hardware, printers, ports, modems, sound cards, video cards, USB ports, everything has drivers. To get an idea of what drivers your system has, go to the My Computer icon, or in Windows XP, go to My Computer on the menu. Right click, then left click on properties. In previous versions of Windows, click on Device Manager. In Windows XP, click on the Hardware tab, then Device Manager. You will get a list similar to the one below.

You don't need to be paranoid about drivers, but again, what I personally do is about once a month, I check all the vendor web sites for all my software and hardware to see if there are any updates for drivers or programs, and if there are, I set a restore point before installing, and also if imaging, do an image, and then install the updates. NOTE: some updates have a specific purpose and are not necessarily posted for all to install, so make sure to read the information on the web site before downloading.  I have had a few occasions where the new driver didn't work well with my system, so all I had to do was restore the computer to before the driver was installed.

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