What do you think is the link between your computers and your printer? Don’t say ‘the cord’. Let’s put it this way, when you give a command to print this page, (assuming you do) how does the printer know that it is this page that you want it to print and not something else? The answer is a nifty little piece of software called the printer driver.
Let us begin our discussion by knowing what a device driver really is and how it functions and why it is necessary to perform regular driver updates for the general well being of the computer.
What Is a Device Driver?
A device driver, as we stated above is the ‘essential link’ between the operating system and other high-end applications installed on a system with the various hardware devices installed or connected to a computer. Without a device driver, devices are pretty much useless. When you play a game for example, certain games might require certain capabilities that your graphic card must possess. These capabilities are provided by the graphic or video driver for your graphic card.
Why Do I Need to Perform Regular Driver Updates?
The drivers that a particular device requires vary based on your operating system. This means that the driver that Windows XP uses might differ from the one used on Windows Vista or Windows 7. There is a separate device drivers for each and every device present on your machine. These devices may range from hard disk drives, to display adapters, sound devices, flash drives, Bluetooth devices, etc.
There are two things a particular device driver must cater to – the version of the operating system on a machine and the device itself. Versions of the driver depend on the operating system in question and also the version of the device.
Drivers of some essential PC hardware come built in with Windows operating system, whereas some accompany the device when you purchase it. Quite often, bugs are detected in the originally-released drivers, which are fixed later by driver manufactures. These updated drivers are usually made available on the driver manufacturer website from where you can download them to update the drivers for your device.
It is essential to install these driver updates to not only to enjoy new features, but also to secure your system from malware built around the bugs detected in these driver software.
However, updating drivers is not an easy task. From audio driver updates, to DVD driver update, video driver update, USB driver update, CD driver update, the list goes on and on. With such a long list of hardware on a single computer, it is practically impossible to ensure that they all stay up-to-date at all times.
This is where third-party driver maintenance and update tools, such as Driver Detective come into picture. These tools are designed to effectively monitor devices and device driver health and are convenient to use in terms of usability and cost.
How Driver Detective Helps with Driver Updates?
Driver Detective helps in maintaining and updating various device drivers required for the proper functioning of your PC and devices installed or connected to it. You can either choose to continuously monitor the status of various device drivers yourself, which trust us, will take a hell lot of time, or you can just sit back and relax while Driver Detective takes care of all work for you.
Driver Detective has a very large device driver database that includes many versions of drivers for different devices. It is also compatible with many different versions of Windows. The tool automatically checks if drivers have updated versions available on the Internet and then enable you to easily download and install them on your computer.
Windows® 98SE, ME, 2000, XP, Vista
Comments on this entry are closed.