What is a Windows Driver?

Drivers (also known as Device Drivers) are software program that operates or controls a particular type of device that is connected to a computer. The main objective of driver is to allow your computer to communicate with hardware or device. For example, if you connect a printer to your computer, it will not recognize it as a printer and you will not be able to use it properly. After the installation of Printer Driver you will have a software interface to your Printer Device and you will be able to access functions of the printer. From time to time, the developers of drivers are launching updates of the drivers, to fix some previous bugs and errors. Every time the update is available you need to update your Drivers so it will work correctly with your hardware. However, when you connect your device to a computer for the first time, Windows will try to find a default driver for that device. The problem is that those drivers are most of the times are outdated and your device will not work at its full performance or in worst case will not work at all.

There are so many drivers that we have decided to sort all drivers in several groups below:

  • 1394
  • This group contains drivers for 1394 devices connected on a PCI bus.
  • Battery
  • This group contains drivers for battery and UPS devices.
  • Bluetooth
  • This group contains drivers for all Bluetooth devices.
  • Webcams, Cameras and Scanners
  • This group contains drivers for image capturing devices, scanners and digital cameras.
  • Card Reader
  • This group contains drivers for smart card readers.
  • CD-ROM
  • This group contains drivers for CD-ROM, DVD-ROM and Blue-Ray drives.
  • Graphic, Video Cards
  • This group contains drivers for video cards and adapters.
  • Hard Disk Controller
  • This group contains drivers for ATA/ATAPI hard disk controllers, but not the SCSI and RAID disk controllers.
  • Hard Disk Drive
  • This group contains drivers for Hard Disk Drives.
  • Input Devices
  • This group contains drivers for USB keyboard, mouse and joystick devices.
  • Keyboards
  • This group contains drivers for keyboards.
  • Mobile Phones & Portable Devices
  • This group contains drivers for various Mobile phones and Portable devices.
  • Modems
  • This group contains drivers for Modem devices.
  • Monitors
  • This group contains drivers for LCD and CRT Monitors
  • Motherboards
  • This group contains drivers for Motherboards.
  • Mice & Touchpads
  • This group contains drivers for all mouse devices and other pointing devices, such as trackballs, etc.
  • Multifunction Devices
  • This group contains drivers for combo cards, such as PCMCIA modem and network card adapter.
  • Network & Wireless Cards
  • This group contains drivers for all kinds of network and wireless cards.
  • Printers
  • This group contains drivers for printers
  • Port devices
  • This group contains drivers for serial and parallel port devices.
  • SCSI Devices
  • This group contains drivers for SCSI and raid devices.
  • Sound Cards & Media Devices
  • This group contains drivers for Audio, DVD multimedia and full-motion video capture devices, and joystick ports.
  • TapeDrive
  • This group contains drivers for Tape Drive devices.
  • USB devices
  • This group contains drivers for USB devices.
  • Others - This group contains drivers which don’t belong to any other group