Device drivers are software programs that allow the operating system in your computer to communicate with different hardware devices inside of or attached to the computer. The computer bus, which is a series of parallel wires on the motherboard, transports the communication to various subsystems of the operating system that accepts the requests and transports the data for the hardware device.
It is absolutely essential to have the correct device drivers for your operating system and the hardware attached to it. You also need to periodically update to the latest drivers the manufacture releases to keep you computer operating at peak efficiency. You can update your drivers manually or download an automated tool to find the drivers you need automatically.
Device drivers have to be written for each hardware device used in the computer. In addition, device drivers are operating system specific. That means that device drivers written for windows XP will not work in windows 7 or any other operating system. Most device are either packaged as Windows dynamic link library (DLL), executable (.exe) files for real hardware drivers and .vxd for virtual drivers.
Some common hardware drivers are:
There are also virtual drivers that are used in VMware, Microsoft HyperV server and the XEN virtualization programs.
What happens if you don’t have the right driver?
It depends but most of the time the hardware will not work at all. However sometimes it will work but very poorly. In fact, Microsoft created a development for device drivers called theWindows Driver Foundation (WDF) to help make windows a more stable operating environment. Within this program there are two separate components, the User Mode Driver Framework (UMDF) and the Kernel-Mode Drive Framework (KMDF).
User Mode Kernel drives use a message based protocol to communicate. When these drivers fail, they do not take down the operating system. Failed Kernel Mode drivers usually cause a Blue screen of death.
No comments:
Post a Comment