Computers are so
embedded in to our daily lives now we barely give them a second thought. We
trust them with taking care of every digital need, from storing memories and
media to organising our homes. But their very ubiquity means we’ve become
complacent with maintenance and it’s only when something goes wrong that we
realise how much we need them.
While we
regularly take out cars in for servicing, the humble PC rarely gets a look in.
It’s not until you’re sitting at the end of crashed system that most users
decide to take action to get it back on track.
You would’ve
thought that PCs, being no more than calculators with delusions of grandeur,
would rarely crash. A PC is no more than a set of computational instructions
with no room for human error so what could possibly go wrong….right? As it
turns out, quite a lot.
There are so
many variables involved in having a working system. Every component and
peripheral you use to navigate your PC, laptop or netbook needs to work in
harmony. But every component and peripheral in your system is designed by
different manufacturers because PCs are open systems. Not only does this myriad
of hardware need to work together, but it also has to talk the same language as
any one of the vast amount of software options available.
Here in lies one of the biggest hurdles PC users face every day, many without
realising it. If you don’t get every inch of your system working in a
harmonious balance, it will crash and burn. Exactly what happens when your
system crashes depends on what caused the crash but, even a simple problem can
take days to fix. For the lucky few it will simply mean the system will
automatically send the crash details to Microsoft’s Windows Error Reporting
Service. For the rest, it could mean a complete system re-install and lost
digital memories – especially if you haven’t backed up your data.
This common
language that systems use to get every piece of hardware working in conjunction
with each other is known as the device driver. These drivers allow every piece
of hardware in your PC to talk to your operating system – not just the internal
hardware like the graphics card but external hardware as well. Every time you
buy and plug in a printer, camera, monitor, mouse or keyboard, they’ll need
their own driver so Windows or whatever operating system you’re using can talk
to it. Sometimes Windows
automatically picks up the driver if you’re online though most manufacturers
still bundle the drivers on a CD for you to install.
If these device
drivers aren’t communicating properly, they may as well be talking gibberish.
But the implications are far, far worse for your system. In fact, 80 percent of system crashes are caused by
faulty or out of date drivers.
It sounds like
a difficult problem to resolve and sorting out driver conflict is not the best
way to spend a Saturday night. You might end stuck in customer service phone
limbo, racking up the phone bills trying to find out why the new printer you
bought isn’t working properly when you should be out painting the town red.
Ensuring best
practice by making sure every individual driver on your system is up to the job
is good policy. Regular system maintenance will always be advisable but if you
get it wrong, it’s easy to make things worse. Even if you think you’ve solved
the problems, your best laid plans could go awry because manufacturers tend to
update their drivers every six month. Additionally, device drivers need to be
installed in the correct order – or you could cause even bigger problems.
That’ll put you back to square one despite your best efforts.
There are some
simple things you can do to take the chore out of system maintenance and making
sure your drivers are working properly. The Bootstrap
team has developed a simple but effective driver update tool that takes the onus
of responsibility away from the end user. This should help take to worry out of
doing a driver update and will give you security and protection against certain
types of system crashes.
DriverHive can
automatically scan your PC to identify out of date drivers for FREE and let you
choose which ones you’d like to update.
The software also automatically creates a system restore point on the PC
before an update. If you are having any issues, this ensures you can roll your system back.
If there’s one
thing DriverHive can’t do it’s protect your system from EVERY crash error. With
most of the word now connected online, systems are susceptible to a whole world
of nasty hacks, viruses, and malware exploits that can clog or kill your
system. It is a big bad world out there that doesn’t have a one-stop-shop
universal balm to cure all. However, you can have peace of mind from
applications like DriverHive that were designed to address 80 percent of the issues
that cause system crashes. Not a bad start at all.
