Monday, March 2, 2009

A Slow Running Computer and The Role Drivers May Play In It

By Ed Lathrop

It has become fairly common knowledge spyware and viruses have the ability to make your computer perform very badly and may actually ruin it altogether. It is also becoming well known registry corruption can make your computer perform just as poorly. The problem is, there are times neither of these things are present and the computer still won't perform, as it should. What else could be happening to cause a computer malady in this instance?

There are other reasons a computer could slow down and perform erratically. In this article, we will discuss one often-overlooked contributor to bad computer behavior. Also, we will talk about how you can deal with this problem.

What is a Device Driver?

Your PC needs additional software so it can communicate with anything you connect to it; even a monitor needs this type of software. Because this software drives the hardware connected to the PC, we refer to these software packages as device drivers. Often common device drivers can be found on the CD the operating system was installed from, other times it will be on a separate CD that came with the hardware being installed.

Either way, a computer needs to have this software so it can interpret the commands being sent from the hardware and so it can send instruction back to that hardware.

One problem arises from the fact early run drivers often need to be upgraded very soon after their release. So, if a computer owner is not aware of this, he or she could have installed a piece of software that will tend to cause problems with the computer's overall operation.

The Generic Driver

Sometimes a driver will cause problems for no other reason than it is cheap. A cheap driver will often be included in a package with of a generic brand of hardware and even though the hardware itself is good the driver is not and this will cause troubles for the PC.

Then again, some drivers that are perfect from the beginning become less effective after Microsoft does one of its automatic operating system upgrades. Of course, as you know, you have no say as to whether or not you want these upgrades.

The Point is Drivers Can Cause Problems

So you see, device drivers can cause problems in a computer. These problems often manifest themselves by slowing down the PC's overall operations.

I know, it sounds like a tall order to find the driver causing a computer slow down and certainly, at one time it was a mammoth task. Now however, there are driver scanners that do all the work for us. This includes finding a replacement or upgraded driver as needed.

The driver scanner in my opinion is the most important computer maintenance tool to come on the market in recent years. When you use a driver scanner alongside a virus cleaner and a registry cleaner, you will be inoculating your computer against just about every problem your computer could come up against and you'll be treating yourself to a computer that should give you years of great service! - 16039

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