With the advent of Windows 7, it would be nice to report that Windows driver problems are a thing of the past. Unfortunately, driver problems are here to stay as long as Windows uses drivers to interface with hardware.

Solving Driver Problems Is Crucial

Driver problems can render a new (or old) piece of hardware completely useless, or they can disable hardware functions. Driver problems can seem to crop up suddenly, especially following an upgrade or addition of some sort, or they can plague a piece of hardware from the day you take it out of the box. There are literally millions of drivers out there. Finding the correct driver for your hardware lies somewhere between science and art these days.

For the last several major revisions, Windows has been equipped with the ability to identify and load the “correct” driver for your attached hardware. That sounds good because it means less work for the end user, right? In practice, however, Windows gets it wrong sometimes, and loading the wrong driver can be just as disastrous as not having a driver at all.

Windows comes with a number of specific and generic drivers, to be sure. For some common hardware, the user needs to look no farther than Windows itself. For other hardware, users must rely on the hardware manufacturer to write and update drivers as needed. When a manufacturer decides that it will no longer update a driver, that decision becomes a kiss of death for the no-longer-supported hardware. The next OS patch or revision may render the unsupported device completely useless.

There’s little the end user can do once a decision is made to drop support for a piece of hardware. Don’t assume that the hardware that’s being dropped is old, either. Many pieces of hardware have lifespans measured in months because the manufacturer has decided not to support the device any longer.

For the most part, however, you can get good results from using a driver management program like Driver Detective to find, install and update your computer’s complement of hardware drivers. Driver Detective has been downloaded and used millions of times to manage hardware drivers.

Driver Detective works on all versions of Windows, and can help keep your computer up-to-date on drivers. Using the most updated drivers can help you avoid more serious problems down the road.

Photo Credit: Percita Dittmar, via Flickr