Hardware Drivers

Even though your operating system is your main interface for your users, and really that interaction between the users and hardware, it's really nothing without drivers. Drivers are what's needed to interact with individual components of the computer. So let's go over what drivers are and take a look into them.

What drivers are

Drivers are one of those system software that's critical for your computer to work. Your operating system is the main set of instructions that tell the computer how it's going to operate. It's made up of many different programs and many different systems all working together to give that seamless interface to the end user.

Now, the problem is there's a lot of different hardware out there, there's a lot of different hardware vendors out there, there's a lot of different things that the operating system needs to interact with. In fact, the computer that you're on right now probably has a huge amount of vendors that play into actually delivering that computer. That is, your motherboard is made by one manufacturer, and the chip is probably made by a different manufacturer. Even on the motherboard itself, it's probably made up of several different vendors all coming together to create that motherboard. And so there is a lot that the operating system has to know on how to function with each one of these devices, and with each one of those vendors.

Now, if they had the set of instructions to operate with all of the vendors and all the hardware in the world, there'd be a couple of problems. It would be a huge operating system — which, it's already very large. But the other problem is, every time you updated something on your computer, you'd have to update the operating system. So that can be problematic. That's where the driver comes into play.

The driver is a separate set of instructions that tell the operating system how to interact with one of the components. So in this example right here, we have a graphics card, and the driver for the graphics card gives the instructions to the operating system, so the operating system knows how to interact with that graphics card.

Here's a little different illustration to help drive home this point. We have a computer right here, and on the computer we have lots of different hardware that's installed on this. We also have an operating system, and that's what the user is interacting with. And then what we have is a CPU driver, and a graphics driver, and storage drivers, and a monitor driver, and print drivers. And this is giving those instructions between the operating system and how that is going to interact with these different components.

Default drivers

Now, one thing there is also is default drivers. The default drivers are so that way the operating system initially knows how to talk to these devices. That is, when we're first installing and setting up a computer, we're going to install an operating system. But how do you even get to the point where you install a driver if the operating system can't interact with the CPU? So what happens is we install some sort of default driver.

So you install the operating system on here, and then it will install default drivers for many of these — not necessarily everything, but for many of these components — and then the system can be up and running. And then once it's up and running, then you will update it to give it additional features. You can either update it by going and downloading the driver and then installing it manually, or there is an automatic feature that will work with some components on your computer.

Device Manager on Windows

Let's take a look at a Windows machine and see what it actually looks like on the machine. So I'm going to click the Windows button and type in Device Manager and open this up. Make it a little bit bigger here. And on here, what you can see is we've got a lot of different categories. These are the different categories of different components on this machine.

So for instance, we have Display adapters. So I open that up — this is the graphics card right here. Graphics cards are usually one of those things that need to be updated, the driver needs to be updated. We also have here the keyboard and some interface stuff, we've got the mouse, we've got monitors — monitors is something that usually doesn't need to be updated — we've got network adapters, we've got printers, processor. So here's the processor on here. So like I say, some of these you'll find that need to be updated, some of them not.

Let's take a look at the graphics card here. So if I right click on here, I can go to Update driver, and then it will pop up with this update driver. I can also go to the properties here. So I'm going to go to Properties, and I find the Driver tab. So I can see that this driver right now is provided by Intel, what the date of this driver is, some details, and I have the Update button here as well.

If I click this Update button, I get that same window as I had before, and I can either search automatically for a driver — so this would search to see if Windows, or even go online and see if there's anything available for this. And sometimes there is, and it makes it real easy where you can just click this and it will do the update, and that's great. But other times you have to actually go and download that driver onto the computer and then browse for this.

Also, there are many drivers that you just download the install file, and you double click the install file, and then it goes through the install process. There is also sometimes, like Dell — this is a Dell machine — Dell has a utility that you install on here, and it will automatically scan for drivers to see if any of them need an update, which can be very handy as well to keep these devices updated.

So there we can see, you also see some like the resources, like the memory allocation, that's specifically for this. So there's some cool interesting stuff that's in here that you can sort through and look at. But here it just shows you all of the devices that you have on your computer, and how the operating system needs these.