Diagnosing and solving driver problems can occupy a lot of time, and if you don’t know much about your computer, the task can seem monumental. Nonetheless, some people are naturally interested in what makes their computers tick.

Driver Problem Troubleshooting Tools

Unless you want to go hard-core on your driver problems, there are only a few tools you may want to put in your driver-problem troubleshooting toolkit. Some of these tools will already be loaded on your computer because they come with the system. Others are worth having but you may need to find or buy them.

One free program you may want to consider is called DriverView. DriverView is a nice utility that is available for both the 32- and 64-bit versions of Windows. DriverView is nice because it helps you identify immediately which drivers belong to the operating system and which ones are third-party drivers. I’ve often found that people tend to turn off (or even remove) system drivers they don’t recognize. They do this because they don’t recognize the driver and can’t tell that it rightfully belongs where it is!

Third-party drivers can also be problematic, since sometimes old, obsolete drivers get left behind when a piece of hardware is removed or replaced. The old driver acts like a bit of a zombie, taking up resources that it doesn’t need and potentially causing conflicts with other drivers.

DriverView will provide in-depth information about each driver it finds, and will allow you to get a better picture of the drivers that are loaded, the version number and other important information. Windows does have a command-line tool called driverquery.exe, but for ease of use, I’d recommend DriverView.

DriverView won’t actually diagnose or correct problems with Windows drivers. You could take the information that DriverView gives you and do your own driver research, but I find it easier to let Driver Detective locate the latest drivers and install them. Driver Detective can also diagnose and repair corrupted or missing drivers, which makes it worth its weight in gold. The program will also remove old drivers that are no longer in use. This alone reduces the chance of driver problems because abandoned drivers don’t accumulate, waiting for an opportunity to “rise from the dead.”

Driver Detective isn’t free, but it’s well worth the money. It does a better job of finding and installing the correct drivers for your computer system.

Photo Credit: Nalilo, via Flickr

Windows driver problems can be frustrating because they’re often difficult to identify. I always recommend using a product like Driver Detective to manage your Windows drivers. Driver Detective will locate, download and install drivers your system needs, update drivers that are already installed and remove drivers your system no longer needs.

Even with the expert management services of Driver Detective, you can still run into driver issues. Most users don’t understand (and don’t want to understand) exactly how their computer systems work. Driver problems can arise seemingly out of thin air, or they can arise immediately after a new piece of hardware has been installed in the computer. They can also show up after the OS or another hardware driver has been updated, installed or even removed.

One good tool for determining the overall performance of your system is called the DPC Latency Checker. This is a free utility that can provide immediate information on the performance of your computer. It can help you diagnose driver problems, though it doesn’t get specific about which driver(s) may be having difficulty. In other words, this tool will point you in the right direction when trying to troubleshoot system problems.

The DPC Latency Checker comes with a tutorial that will help you figure out how to use the program. DPC Latency checker is a small program, and there’s no installing to do, simply download it and run it.

DPC Latency Checker measures how quickly your system responds to your commands. As you open and close applications, DPC Latency Checker will graphically display your system’s response capabilities. Using this tool while you perform certain problematic tasks can help you determine what the system is doing. You may need to disable devices and then re-add them one at a time to determine which devices may be causing difficulty.

Once you’ve located the problem, you can disable the misbehaving device as a temporary measure. If you don’t have Driver Detective loaded, you might try locating the following to resolve the issue:

Apply all OS updates and security patches.
Uninstall the driver for the misbehaving device.
Apply all driver updates and patches for the misbehaving device. Check with the device manufacturer for the most up-to-date driver, and be sure to pay attention to the specific OS requirements of each driver. If the most current driver won’t work with your OS, locate the last good driver for your version of the OS and install that one.

Try the suspect device once a fresh copy of the driver is installed to see if your problem has been resolved.

Photo Credit: jepoirrier, via Flickr

Microsoft announced earlier this week that it will make a time-limited version of Windows 7 Enterprise edition available to IT professionals who don’t otherwise have access to the RTM version of the software. The 90-day trial is available for download and requires registration to get the full value of the 90-day trial.

Windows Drivers Will Need To Be Reinstalled

Once the 90-day trial window has expired, the software will shut down and reboot every hour. For downloaders who don’t register, the shutdown routine will begin 10 days after the version is initially downloaded. In addition, once the OS is locked out, users will have to perform a clean install, including all Windows 7 drivers and applications to restore the full function of the OS.

Aside from being time-limited, the free download offer is also time-limited. Microsoft will make the Windows 7 Enterprise trial version available only until March 31, 2010, or until its designated number of licenses have been distributed. The Windows 7 Enterprise software is the fully functional version of the release package that was distributed to Volume Licensing users and those with Software Assurance agreements.

In all, the Windows 7 Enterprise trial is a good deal for IT professionals who need to evaluate and test Windows 7, or who need to ensure that the new OS version will work with specific drivers or applications. The 90-day test window is generous enough to ensure that any specific problems with your proposed driver and software load will become apparent, and may even provide enough time for hardware vendors to produce compatible drivers to replace older or non-compatible ones.

If Microsoft wanted to go all out on testing for Enterprise customers, it would also provide a test version of the Windows 2008 server. A seat-limited 2008 Server edition would enable Enterprise users to determine how well the combined 2008 Server/Windows 7 combination will work in the enterprise environment. After all, it was the mismatch between Windows Vista and the heavily used Windows Server 2003 that made Windows Vista largely unattractive to the enterprise crowd. Microsoft assures that the new Server 2008 and Windows 7 combination resolve the most unpleasant issues, including those involving Active Directory. By providing a complete enterprise test environment, Microsoft would go a long way toward alleviating the fears of Enterprise that prevented Vista from being widely adopted.

In all, it’s clear that Microsoft expects a win from Windows 7 and is pulling out all the stops – at least for 90 days – to ensure that the right people have access to its latest Windows release.

Photo Credit: Pablo Korona, via Flickr

Windows 7 is about ready to hit the streets and Microsoft wants to make sure that the corporate rollout experience is smooth, or at least smoother than OS upgrades have been in the past. To that end, Microsoft has introduced a few features, tools and services, including one mean to help manage drivers, that should help enterprise-level users make a smooth transition from their current version to Windows 7.

Windows 7 Separates Drivers From Images

Drivers have been a major hang-up since the introduction of Vista two years ago. Since Microsoft isn’t taking any chances this time, the software giant took a long look at the way drivers were rolled out in Enterpriseville. What they found was that enterprise users were loading many more drivers than were needed in order to compensate for the large number of desktops they were servicing. Loading more drivers than what’s needed opens the door for potential conflicts and other problems, like slow installation times.

To correct this, Microsoft added “Dynamic Driver Provisioning” which allows drivers to be stored in a central location, separately from an image. The system allows IT professionals to select drivers by BIOS sets or by a device’s Plug and Play ID. Images can also be updated offline, and different images with different driver configurations can be stored in an image library. The image library concept isn’t new to Windows 7; this feature was also present in Windows Vista.

Speeding up installations was also a primary concern. IT professionals in large work environments have used third-party multicast tools to blast new images to networked computers for years. Now Microsoft offers Multicast Multiple Stream Transfer, a multicast service that can send data to multiple workstations simultaneously.

Speed is also in the mix for the Windows 7 product. Microsoft has struggled with the size of the operating system and the length of time the system required to load. The company offered a half-compromise with Vista that enabled the system to load the most used parts of the operating system first, giving the appearance (but not always the quality) of being ready to go. Microsoft now says that the Windows 7 system loads completely within 11 seconds of boot-up.

To accomplish that, the company has worked closely with Intel to optimize the performance of the OS with the capabilities of Intel’s newest chipsets. The result is lower power consumption (great for laptops and other portable computing devices), better virtualization and better overall performance.

Photo Credit: uzi978