Your hardware devices and peripherals are like kids who do not know how they should behave. Your PC acts like a teacher, giving instructions to these devices, telling them how to act in different circumstances. Device drivers are like teaching guides that your PC will use to recognize and “teach” your devices. Once you load these device drivers in the hard disk, the PC will know exactly what the devices are supposed to do, and will be ready to communicate the instructions to those devices. Thus device drivers are just as important for you to have as the devices themselves. In fact, most devices won’t even work if you do not load the device driver for those in your hard disk, because your computer will simply not recognize those devices.

Let us see what happens when you wish to print something using a printer. You give an instruction to the computer to “ask” the printer to print the document. But how would the computer recognize the printer? Through device drivers, of course! When you installed the printer, you loaded the drivers for the printer into your hard disk. The computer is going to use those device drivers now, to send your instructions to the printer. So, without the device drivers, you would not be able to print anything at all, even if you had the best printer available in stores.

Device drivers vary according to the operating system on your machine. The device driver that you load for a particular device on a PC running the Microsoft Windows® operating system will be completely different from the driver you would load if you were using a Linux-based computer. Before you load a device driver for any device on your computer, make sure that you know which operating system you are using on your computer, and whether the driver works with that operating system. Also, make sure that you load only the latest, updated device drivers for your devices in your computer. Updated versions of device drivers contain more fine tuned instructions for your devices, allowing those to perform better.

Finally, make sure you know what you are doing before you load any device driver in your computer. If you have doubts regarding the installation of a driver, call up a qualified system engineer and let him handle it. It’s better to spend a little extra cash, than to damage your PC hardware by accidentally loading the wrong device drivers.