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TechKnowSurge Catalog Videos OS Functions: Device Management
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OS Functions: Device Management

The operating system acts as the central coordinator for all hardware devices in a computer, using drivers to communicate with each one. Device Manager in Windows provides a practical interface for viewing and managing these connected components.

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About this video

A computer's operating system is responsible for managing every hardware device connected to or installed within the system. Components like keyboards, mice, graphics cards, and network adapters all require dedicated processing time, and conflicts can arise when multiple devices compete for resources at once. The operating system resolves these conflicts by establishing priorities and coordinating device activity to ensure reliable, orderly processing across the entire system. Because the operating system cannot natively communicate with every hardware device, it relies on drivers to bridge that gap. A driver is a set of instructions that tells the OS exactly how to interact with a specific piece of hardware, allowing the system to support a wide range of devices from different manufacturers without requiring built-in knowledge of each one. Windows Device Manager is the built-in tool used to view and manage this hardware ecosystem. Accessible directly from the Start menu, it presents all connected devices organized into categories such as disk drives, display adapters, and keyboards. Selecting an individual device, such as a graphics card, reveals detailed information including driver data and hardware properties, giving administrators and users a clear picture of how each component is configured and functioning within the system.

What you'll learn

What's covered

Operating System Device Management

Aligned to

CompTIA Tech+
3.1 Explain the purpose of operating systems.
3.2 Compare and contrast components of an operating system.
CompTIA A+ Core 2
1.8 Explain common OS types and their purposes.
1.3 Given a scenario, use features and tools of the Microsoft Windows 10/11 operating system (OS).
1.5 Given a scenario, troubleshoot Microsoft Windows OS problems.
CompTIA A+ Core 1
3.4 Given a scenario, install and configure motherboards, central processing units (CPUs), and add-on cards.
Cisco CCST IT
2.2 Assist end users in using tools to locate information about their device
2.4 Identify, install and upgrade various components in a desktop computer

Key terms

Operating System
OS
System software that manages hardware resources, provides common services for application software, and acts as an intermediary between users and computer hardware. Examples include Windows, macOS, and Linux.
Device Driver
A separate set of software instructions that tells the operating system how to interact with a specific hardware component.
Device Manager
A Windows administrative utility that lists all hardware components recognized by the operating system and allows users to view device status, update drivers, disable hardware, or troubleshoot conflicts.
Network Interface Card
NIC
A hardware component that connects a computer to a network.

Topics

Operating Systems Device Management Device Drivers Windows Device Manager Hardware Components

Transcript

Your keyboard, your mouse, your graphics card, your network card: these are all devices that need to be managed and need to have some processing time. Of course, sometimes they want to have processing time at the same time, and so there needs to be a priority on which takes effect first, which gets processing time first. Well, that's all part of the process of the operating system. Your operating system coordinates all of these devices and makes sure that things get processed correctly.

Devices and Drivers

There's a lot on your computer, and we need something to be able to manage all of these devices, and that's what your operating system does. It manages these devices. Of course, a lot of times it doesn't know how to utilize or talk directly to each one of these devices, so therefore we also have this driver. The driver is like a set of instructions that tell the operating system how to interact with these different devices.

Device Manager

I'm on my demo laptop and we're going to take a quick look at device manager. If I click my start button here and just type in device manager and hit enter, it'll pop up with the device manager and we can see the devices on this machine. So this is all the categories. And if we were to open up one of the categories, for instance if we open up disk drives, we can see two different drives on here. We see a USB flash drive and then we see some NVMe storage here. We also can see display adapters, we can see some keyboards, we see some information on all of the devices on this computer that this computer is managing.

What I want to do is just take a look at one of these devices, so we're going to look at the graphics card. So here's the graphics card here. We can see some information about this graphics card, we see some driver information about this, and there's some other details that we have as well. So this is just showing you some information about this particular graphics card.

So device manager is what we can use to manage the different devices through this operating system.

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