It’s not always easy to know how to get the most out of complex tools. And there are few tools in common use as complex as the modern computer. A computer consists of a vast number of extremely complex parts all working together as a singular whole. And in fact, it can be rather surprising to see how smoothly this can all work out together. The main reason this is possible is thanks to something known as drivers.
Drivers are an important part of the modern computing world. And they were one of the main reasons why the public really started to see the potential of home computers. Drivers as they’re known today were a huge leap forward for the overall integration of hardware and software. It wasn’t so long ago that one would quite literally have to install new hardware by using a command line.
This required a level of understanding beyond even most of today’s power users. And the idea of an average person being able to do this is beyond implausible. But that isn’t a very good situation for a platform as fast moving as computers. Computer development moves fast and people want to upgrade specific elements of their computers.
Thankfully modern operating systems helped solve the problem. Even if this was somewhat unintentional at first. Modern operating systems like Windows introduced true multitasking. What’s more, the memory requirements became a lot easier to manage thanks to lowered overall costs for RAM. In practical terms this means that something like Windows was suddenly able to hold hundreds of programs in memory at the same time. Basically, it was now possible for the operating system to have special programs running which would take care of hardware requests. These are known as drivers. Every device plugged into a computer will need a driver of one sort or another. And this even goes for some of the components within the base system itself.
For example, consider the case of Asus z390 drivers. The z390 is a motherboard. Basically, the motherboard can be thought of as both the brain and heart of a computer. But even it has some drivers run by the underlying operating system. The BIOS can take care of many things. But it’ll still need specific drivers for things like LAN or audio. How does one go about that? The easy answer is that some automated driver services can take care of all of that. One doesn’t have to. But the more devices one needs to carefully manage the more time it can take up.
Without an automated driver manager one would want to go to the hardware manufacturer’s website. In this case the Asus z390 drivers would be found on the Asus website. One would then extract the drivers onto a hard drive where they’ll be easy to find later on. Next, one would press the windows key and the R key at the same time. This will bring up the run box. The user should type in devmgmt.msc into the run box to bring up the device manager. The device manager will show a list of hardware on one’s device.
The part a user should look for is anything with a question mark. Question marks indicate hardware Windows isn’t quite sure about. One should right click on those, and pick Update driver. From the user can browse through the file manager to select the necessary drivers. It should be noted that Windows might not know exactly how to use the hardware, but it might have a general idea. It will therefore be able to avoid a lot of unnecessary things in the archive. This makes it a lot easier to find the right driver. Also, there will be some minor variation depending on what version of Windows someone is using.
The drivers are usually in folders with the operating system name on it. And in general the biggest difference in actually installing the driver is small changes on where menu options are located. For example, the older versions of Windows require one to bring up the properties tab before selecting Update Driver.
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