How Drivers Work on your PC

You know a lot about your computer in terms of functionality, you know the tools and applications you need to do your work. No one pays much attention to or cares about how a PC actually works internally much less about how drivers work on your PC, this is never necessary to know until a crash course in PC maintenance pays you a visit.

Driver corruption, missing drivers and incompatible and outdated drivers are very common in any windows platform.

So how do drivers work?

First, what's a driver anyway? A driver is a tiny, mini, little piece of software that is essentially a set of instructions that the windows operating system learns for properly communicating with your hardware devices. You internal hardware and peripheral devices need these instructions to work, and drivers provide that level of translation between you and the OS on your PC. All drivers are loaded on to memory when the system boots up and these instructions remain in memory until the system powers down.

The importance of updating drivers

PC drivers get outdated easily. Your windows operating system is usually already configured to automatically fetch patches and service packs from Microsoft backend servers, during this time your PC hardware is also updated with the latest manufacturer driver updates. But If your hardware's driver does not have a windows logo approval or a digital signature, it won't be upgraded during a windows update. You'll have to download drivers manually.

If updates are skipped and your PC happens to have more than a handful of generic type hardware devices manufactured overseas, chances are there are no signatures for these drivers and the manufacturers have not bothered to apply for a digital signature, so this can be a hassle if you don't know much about updating drivers manually.

Depending on how drivers work on your PC after a widows update you may need to do some digging and find those updates. Windows updates may sometimes cause a corrupted driver, what this means is that security fixes or operating system updates have rendered some device drivers unusable.

How to automate the driver update process

Corrupted and missing drivers are just a way of life for PCs, it's never an if, it's a when something will stop working. These instructions do go missing, they become corrupted and in many cases they're relatively easy to revert or recover, but in other cases frustration gets the best of the user and it pushes them to reinstall the entire system. Don't do that!

Driver updates do not have to be done manually and do not have to be frustrating. You no longer have to wonder how drivers work or how to download drivers. All you need to do from now on is do a driver scan of your system to find the devices that require updates, let the driver tool download the needed drivers automatically so you can get back to work quicker.