If you’ve been around computers for a long time, the prospect of an easy OS upgrade (or even an OS update) can seem grim. It’s a story heard ’round-the-world, so to speak, and it goes something like this: new OS doesn’t like old drivers. Another variation on the story is that an old piece of hardware that’s critical to the operation (or still in perfect working order or required for a legacy function) isn’t made anymore and there’s no driver support for the device beyond what the manufacturer abandoned, etc.

Missing Hardware Drivers Can Ruin Your Day
The lack of drivers could certainly ruin your day. Microsoft has received more than an earful of complaints regarding driver availability and driver quality and tried to build in an automated driver update process. The thinking was that whenever the OS updated, Windows would go out and find the right drivers and send them along to your OS.

Good thought. Bad execution. Many Windows users found that Windows was downloading the incorrect drivers, replacing drivers that didn’t need replacement, missing drivers that should have been passed along in the critical updates, and other driver mishaps. They also found out – often too late – that they didn’t know how to configure their computers correctly for the automatic updates to take place, and that the auto updates often slowed the computer down to a crawl at critical times, like shutdown. If that weren’t enough, many hardware vendors never released updated drivers after an OS update, leaving plenty of users sitting in the dust.

The result: users who were still unhappy about the driver situation in Windows on top of the same never-fully-addressed driver situation in Windows. Now, to be sure, the automatic updates work sometimes. Most computer users don’t want a computer that works sometimes, though. I know I don’t. Although computer techs don’t like to admit it, most computer users just want to sit down at their computers and work. They don’t want to worry about driver updates, or OS updates. They don’t even want to worry about their anti-virus updates!

For those users, one of the best solutions – at least in the foreseeable future – is a product like Driver Detective. It’s a top-selling driver manager that automatically finds, loads and checks the status of each driver each time the computer starts. Driver Detective will find missing and broken drivers, apply driver updates and generally keep things flowing smoothly. It’s ideal for the millions of users who just want their computers to work.

Photo Credit: Angie Lauw, via Flickr