Is it worth bothering with Downloading drivers?

FatRakoon

FatRakoon

FatRakoon

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Since moving to Win7, I have been so impressed with it, that I am now happy to say that my whole family now runs Win7 although I am still keeping one on XP64, one on Linux and one with Vista.

But, the 5 main family PCs are now on Win 7... All 64 Bit of course.

Now, I have noticed that there have been a few inconsistencies or issues that have all been caused, not by Windows 7 itself, but by the drivers, and in every single case, this has been cured completely by not bothering to install the drivers and instead letting Windows find and use its own

Perfect examples of this are that Quake 2 wont change to Open GL Mode and so removing the drivers and resorting to Widnows own drivers, has let me play it.

Other games are playing perfectly fast enough and Im wondering if eve nthe higher end games are any better off or not anyway?

This has also been the case with my creative cards. once I got rid of creative drivers and resorted to windows own... Any and all issues have been completely removed totally.

I am now happy to say that since I removed all traces of all drivers that I have not had a single problem with any of my PCs and I am back to the perfect reliability of XP64 again.

So, I would like to suggest that from now on, if anyone has a compatibility problem, to simply remove all their drivers and just give it a shot.
 
My own philosophy is to keep things simple. If, for example, my sound works out of the box I'll leave it alone - there is no way I'd go hunting for another driver except in cases where I needed to enable a specific feature. Wireless networking tools as well are a good example, I hate them.

The only exception to this is graphics card drivers, but even then I can go for months on end without firing up a game and by that time I've forgotten what driver I'm using anyway and I can't say I notice. Anyone half serious about gaming would without doubt want the latest but for casual users I don't see any harm in leaving the default ones in. Updates appear in Windows Update anyway, just on a much less regular basis.

Microsoft have raised the bar a lot in regards to drivers, and although they are much less likely to take out your system anymore I suppose you're always going to get the odd quirk.
 
Yes, out of the box is a good idea.

Annoyingly, with my own computers, for some reason, ( and one that I am utterly grateful for ) is that since moving over to XP 64 Bit some 8 or so years ago, I have not had a blue screen of any kind.

And in fact when the X800GTO was my main card, I never bothered with drivers for some time and eventually when I did, because some game ran seriously slow, I assumed it was the card simply being too slow for the game.... Medal Of Honour - Airborne Im sure it was?

Anyway, I bought a new card only to then realise only a few minutes after clicking "BUY" that I dont use the drivers... I installeod the drivers and the game worked fine.

So, yes, sometimes the drivers are needed, however, I have played the game since and not had any drivers other than the ones that Windows finds.

Im currently using nVIDIA but the X800GTO obviously, is ATI

I will have to check out what the situation is with ATI but all the nVidia PCs no longer have the Detonators in, and they are all running all their games perfectly fine.
 
FatRakoon said:
Annoyingly, with my own computers, for some reason, ( and one that I am utterly grateful for ) is that since moving over to XP 64 Bit some 8 or so years ago, I have not had a blue screen of any kind.
Click to expand...

Microsoft introduced something called "PatchGuard" with the x64 versions of Windows, which basically crashed the system when it detected any modification of the kernel. This basically gave manufacturers two choices when writing 64 bit drivers:

  • Tinker with the Windows kernel and crash the system
  • Write the drivers properly

You can probably work out which choice was better for everyone. This is one (and perhaps the most likely) reason you've not seen any blue screens for a while.
 
It's probably only worthwhile to have the latest drivers for graphics cards these days.

Every single BSOD I've seen on 64-bit Windows has been the result of hardware instability. BSODs because of bad drivers seem to be a thing of the past on 64-bit.
 
theheyes said:
Microsoft introduced something called "PatchGuard" with the x64 versions of Windows, which basically crashed the system when it detected any modification of the kernel. This basically gave manufacturers two choices when writing 64 bit drivers:

  • Tinker with the Windows kernel and crash the system
  • Write the drivers properly

You can probably work out which choice was better for everyone. This is one (and perhaps the most likely) reason you've not seen any blue screens for a while.
Click to expand...

That's a rather tenuous link. PatchGuard isn't really the reason why the frequency of BSODs have reduced over the past decade.

The real reason is just continuous improvement, from all sides. If Microsoft produces a better Driver Development Kit and documentation, then generally better drivers are produced by third parties.

Windows NT is a well understood kernel by developers. Windows 9x, was not - because it was one giant hack.
 
I find on Win 7 you only need to put the latest chipset (& graphics for dedicated cards) drivers on as it will find the rest itself and they update (sound/network/wireless) when on Windows Update.
 
The only thing I had to install for my Win7 laptop was the Nvidia drivers.

For some reason I couldn't get SLI working with the native Win7 drivers, everything else worked from install.
 
SLI was an issue for me too.

I even had to make sure that both the Chipset and the VGA Drivers matched up or I'd get a black screen when I had 2 cards in, but this soon stopped.

My SLI System is currently running 3x7800GTX and its onboard is also 7800GTX ( Wohoo ) and thats of course Quad SLI and is running off Win7's own drivers

( Might I also add that 4-way SLI is every bit as disappointing as 2-way )
 
Installing Windows 7 on most machines is an absolute dream. I love having it installed and ready to go within an hour! Windows XP and Vista weren't particularly slow to install, but you spent an age downloading and installing drivers and the countless restarts... arrrgh! >.<

I agree that if possible chipset and graphics drivers should be installed, but as shown by many here even that is not always necessary.
 
NathanE said:
That's a rather tenuous link. PatchGuard isn't really the reason why the frequency of BSODs have reduced over the past decade.
Click to expand...

Hence "one reason", admittedly maybe not the most likely, I was more linking in to what the OP was saying about being all 64 bit. I agree, I've not seen (random) x86 blue screens for a long time either.
 
Intel chipset INF update utility
Intel Matrix storage Manager (hotswap SATA)
nVidia forceware
Asus Xonar drivers


That's all I've ever manually updated on mine for core system components because they're best updated.
 
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