What To Do When You Are Uncertain About Your Driver Updates

Computers will always come with some level of complexity. It’s simply the nature of these machines. They’re incredibly complex devices that become even more so every year. People often forget just how much things have changed over the past decade. But computers have gone from single-core designs to averaging four to eight processors on a single board. Not to mention that even a single core can use a virtualized process to handle things that would have been daunting back in the day. It’s not surprising that people often find themselves perplexed by aspects of the modern computing world.

However, there are some problems which one can usually get to the bottom with a little extra study. And drivers, in particular, are usually less of a problem than they seem at first. People usually have two questions above any other when it comes to drivers. The first is to simply ask what drivers actually are.

Drivers are a very complex compilation of various hardware-related functions. But the operating system tries to hide much of the complexity from users. As such, this huge array of functionality is usually compiled down to a single DLL file. One can think of this as a program used by other programs. In this example, it’s the operating system using a driver to communicate with external devices.

One can also think of it as a chorus of voices. Each driver communicates with the operating system. The operating system can be thought of as a conductor. Ideally, every voice in the chorus should sing in harmony with the others. Likewise, every driver should work with others in perfect harmony. But what would happen if one voice in a chorus was out of synch? It would lead to confusion in the rest. And this is often what happens with drivers over time.

This leads to the second issue most people wonder about with their drivers. They’re often not even aware of the specifics. But they wonder why their drivers aren’t running properly. They might not know it’s an issue with drivers. But they do notice the process controlled by drivers isn’t performing correctly.

This is also the point where most people stumble. They wonder about driver support in terms of every single device on their system. And it’s true that people will usually find proper driver support on every hardware manufacturer’s website. But it’s also true that they have far more pieces of hardware than they’ll care to manage. And this is where the harmony of a driver’s chorus becomes out of sync. All of the drivers talk to the operating system. But the operating system notices that some of the drivers are newer than others. Yet other drivers expect functionality in the others that just isn’t there.

Some of the more complex drivers should be handled by third party automated update tools. Graphics cards, in particular, are usually best handled that way. But because the operating system is the main point of convergence for drivers it makes sense to try to let the operating system sort things out. Windows even comes with a tool to help the process. One simply needs to go to the start menu and click settings. A new window will appear. On here one simply needs to click Updates & Security.

From here one can manually check for updates on all drivers. What’s more, there’s something even better under advanced options. One simply goes to change settings and there should be an option to enable automatic updates. This will ensure the operating system can fully manage driver updates. This is what will ultimately remove any confusion about operating system updates. Because one doesn’t need to really give it too much thought past that point. The operating system itself will handle all that.