Your PC’s operating system relies heavily on device drivers to communicate with a piece of hardware. For example, a printer’s driver will tell the operating system to print information on the page. Similarly, a graphics card driver will ensure proper 3D video output on the monitor screen. The same applies to audio cards, monitors and keyboards. All device drivers are managed by the Device Manager section in Windows Operating System.
A Device driver is the key to overall performance of a piece of hardware. An outdated or corrupt driver can spell serious performance issues, which might even stop the hardware to function properly.
Why System Drivers Are So Important?
Each computer has several inbuilt system drivers. Moreover, they have different types of devices installed. The devices are created by different manufacturers. Some devices come in many different formats. The best example is a DVD drive, which reads and writes disks in different formats, namely, DVD-RAM, DVD-RW, DVD-R, DVD+R and so on. The diverse range of devices and formats makes it unfeasible for your computer’s operating system to communicate with the device.
To make things easy, system drivers come to the rescue. They act as translators or intermediaries between each device and operating system. Each driver is developed specifically for a particular device and comes in different versions for the operating system.
System drivers convert high level commands sent by the operating system into low level instructions, which helps the device to understand easily. The device responds to the command, which is translated and sent via the driver to the operating system.
Consequences of Outdated Drivers on Your PC:
The possibility of system errors is inevitable if the drivers are outdated or corrupt. Failing to uninstall drivers can lead to serious consequences. The best way to illustrate the problems is to understand the example of an outdated video codec driver:
Your PC needs to know how to read a movie file. It also needs to understand how to decompress AV files and display movie scenes through the video card. To make this possible, Your PC requires video codec drivers. These drivers decode the video data to help the video card render and display movies on the screen. Different video codecs have different formats. With the introduction of online video streaming, newer formats are been developed to ensure displaying maximum compressed videos. Outdated video codec drivers can result in serious video performance issues. These include:
- No video output: Media player cannot play video file
- No audio output: Player can play video, but there’s no audio
- Video-related errors such as “unexpected file format” or “decoder errors” or “missing codecs”
- Poor quality pictures
- Streaming video does not play on your system
- Low frame rate
While only one corrupt video codec driver hampers your entertainment, just imagine how poor the system will perform with multiple outdated drivers. That’s why it is very important to update system drivers. Updating drivers can be done manually or with the help of driver update software. Whatever be your decision, always remember that updated device drivers are the key reason for the optimal performance of your system.