Installing New Drivers

What are Drivers? They are programs written to allow the computer to talk to the hardware that you have installed. Due to the wide assortment of peripheral devices, such as Video and Audio cards in the market today, it is impossible for software programmers to account for all devices in their applications.

To compensate for this the programmers code their applications to use drivers. These drivers take the instructions from the application and then translates them into something that the hardware can understand. This makes it the responsibility of the hardware manufacturer to provide up to date drivers so that new applications can take advantage of the capabilities of the hardware and to allow the software to compensate for shortcomings in the hardware by using software emulation.

Having the most up to date drivers for the primary I/O Components, the Audio and Video Cards allow your computer to play the neat graphics and awesome sounds that the Programmer envisioned when he/she wrote the program.

To install new drivers, Open the System folder in Control Panel. Select the Device Manager Tab. Identify the device that you want to replace the drivers for, and double-click to bring up the properties sheet for that device. Then select the Driver Tab and Change Drivers. During the install process, select the Have Disk button, and direct the browser to the location of the updated drivers.

You will be required to reboot the computer to complete the installation of new hardware drivers.

If you have problems with the install process, you should contact the hardware manufacturer Tech Support for assistance in locating the most recent and up to date drivers, and installing them in your system.

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