Update drivers to improve system performance

What are drivers?

Drivers are software designed to act as a bridge between your computers operating system and hardware devices. (Tells your computer how to use hardware devices such as keyboard, CPU, etc)

Why do some drivers need to be updated?

• Enables a computer device to function
• Fix any problems/bugs with older/outdated versions of drivers
• Compatibility issues with different operating systems
• Improve stability and performance of the driver/computer

Overtime computer hardware manufactures release new drivers to fix and improve the devices performance.

Outdated Drivers can cause:

• computers to not boot normally;
• freezing/Blue Screen;
• data loss;
• programs and hardware to not work;
• slowing of the computer/reduced performance;
• And other instability issues.

Important information about updating drivers

• You might be thinking you have never installed a driver before, but you’re probably wrong. If you have inserted a flash drive (portable storage device), mouse, keyboard, speakers, etc you have likely installed a driver without even knowing about it. When I first plugged my 500 GB portable storage device into my computer it automatically installed the driver software.
• Installing and updating drivers is normally safe but on occasion drivers can causes problem like driver conflict and cause instability issues and possibly stop the computer from booting normally. If you can’t boot after installing/updating a driver you should boot into safe mode and you can then fix your driver problem that way.
• The majority of drivers are packed into automatic software installers so all you have to do is run the executable file for the driver to be installed.
• It is extremely risky and frowned upon to install a device driver obtained anywhere other than from the manufactures site. All drivers (even updates) should be acquired through the manufacture site – if you can’t find it contact their help support.
• On the rare occasion the latest drivers are not the best solution as they might contains bugs or conflict with your current set of hardware. If you experience problems after updating a driver just revert back to the previous version.
• Drivers will either came in an installation executable such as “installdriver.exe” or INF files such as “installdriver.inf”. INF files are generally used for installing device drivers.

How to manually update drivers

• Open Device Manager
• Navigate through the hardware device categories until you find the driver you want to update and then right-click on the driver and click “Update Driver” and then follow the prompts.

OR

• Download the latest driver from the manufactures website and run the executable installer file.

Using Driver Updater Software

Updating drivers is not for the faint hearted as things can easily go wrong, and considering this I recommend average users, and below seek out driver updating software rather than manually performing the task.

I recommend Uniblue Driver Scanner 2010, you also can look around this site for other driver updating software I have reviewed or use Google.