How to Troubleshoot Problems with your Drivers

A driver refers to a computer program that gives other computer programs the ability to communicate with a hardware device such as a printer, scanner, network card or sound card. Drivers can also be used for other types of hardware as well. The driver serves a medium between the computer and the hardware, allowing both devices to communicate with one another. Most drivers work by communicating with the computer bus, which is the subsystem that transmits data between the hardware being operated by the driver and the driver itself. When issuing a command to a piece of hardware (i.e. sending a document to the printer or playing an audio file), the driver transmits the command to the device, which is interpreted by the hardware. The type of driver you will need or use is dependent on what hardware you have installed on the computer and what operating system you are using at the time.

Since the device drivers you are using have play a huge role in how you are able to use your computer and its hardware, driver problems can cause a great deal of damage to your machine. The majority of crashes in Windows computers are often the result of faulty drivers. One of the main reasons why drivers fail is that they are often written very aggressively, often demanding a great deal of resources from your computer. Drivers will often initiate “must succeed” requests form memory that forces your operating system to allocate additional memory even when it is low on resources. As a result, you machine will generate termination efforts like the now infamous Blue Screen of Death.

One of the ways best ways to manually troubleshoot driver issues is to check to see if there is a more updated version of critical drivers installed on your computer and update regularly. If you have Windows XP, this is now very easy to do because drivers are now included in Windows Update. You can also use the Windows Update features to find out if a driver is having problems or if it is using up too much of your memory.