Chapter 14. Hardware & Drivers
If your Windows machine is a tablet, good for you. You probably won’t have to spend much time mucking around with peripherals and their drivers. But if you have a regular PC, adding new gear is part of the fun. Hard drives, flash drives, cameras, phones, printers, scanners, network cards, video cards, keyboards, monitors, game controllers, and other accessories all make life worth living.
Before you can use a piece of equipment new to the PC, you must hook it up and install its driver, the software that lets it talk to the rest of the PC.
The driver issue was once a chronic, nagging worry for the average Windows fan. Drivers conflicted; drivers went missing; drivers went bad; drivers went out of date.
Fortunately, Microsoft has made strides in addressing the driver problem. Windows 10 comes with thousands upon thousands of drivers for common products already built in, and Microsoft deposits dozens more on your hard drive, behind the scenes, with every Windows update. Chances are good you’ll live a long and happy life without ever having to lose a Saturday manually configuring new gizmos, as your ancestors did.
Most of the time, you plug in some new USB gadget, and bam—it’s ready to use. You don’t have to install anything, walk through any wizards, or sacrifice any animals.
This chapter counsels you on what to do when the built-in, autorecognized drivers don’t do the trick.
Note
Chapter 13 contains additional hardware-installation details specific ...
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