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Computer Driver Blog & Links

Do you know what a “driver” is? It’s not just another one of those buzzwords people use to impress you, every computer hardware device in the world has some sort of “driver” associated with it..

Why is that you say?

Well let’s say you build a device that prints and call it a printer. The printer has no idea how to communicate or talk to (1) a PC (IBM compatible computer (2) Mac compatible computer or (3) any other computer or (4) network or other device.

A driver is a software routine that handles communications from/to a device and from/to a specific type of computer.

But of course computers themselves need drivers so they can talk to you. We call those drivers “Operating Sytems” and give them labels such as Window, Mac, Unix, etc. Operating Systems are the ultimate main driver of machines we call computers and ”Drivers” refers to the smaller device driver software routine that let a device talk to the computer and the comuter talk to the device.

Got all that? Not sure I do.

Sometimes a Driver doesn’t work properly and the manufacturer of the device or a third party “updates” the Driver to a newer, usually better and often faster and more efficient, version. So from time to time you may want ot check to be sure you have the lastest version of the Driver.

Or you may buy a device and have no way to get it to talk to your computer.

So you need a driver do you? There are a lot of places on the web that let you download drivers including Microsoft who offer a very large list of drivers to make their Windows operating systems work well with just about any device.

We’d sure like to have you add your comment about your experinces with drivers or links to drivers below….

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