If there were no device drivers, your computer won’t be able to function. You can say that the driver is the soul of the computer. It is what makes it run. Without drivers, your computer is just one big, lifeless machine.
The drivers are what the computer uses to talk to its devices. The basic components of a computer include the motherboard, processor unit, and memory. All other devices connected to it are expansion devices – the video card, sound card, Ethernet, modem, and all kinds of USB devices.
For instance, the computer needs the video card so that the user can see and use the computer. In order for your monitor to light up, the video card has to be initialized. To make that happen, the processor would have to communicate to the video drivers so that it can process the data needed. All of these happen in a split second. This is why you can see something on your monitor the moment you flick the power button of your computer.
The drivers serve as the link between the operating system and the hardware. Drivers are sets of codes that are understood and processed by the operating system. Through it, the operating system can instruct the driver to make the hardware work as designed. Faults in the driver would make the entire process fail. That’s also when you encounter errors while trying to access or run a program.
Users need not be concerned about drivers because they usually work in the background. It just needs one-time installation and the operating system would know what to do with it. There’s no need to run a program for your sound to run. It would automatically play your music the moment you use the media player. In the same way, you don’t have to do anything for your network connection to work. The operating system loads them in during boot up process. That’s the reason why you hear the Windows sound when turning on your computer and you can access the internet through your broadband connection right after boot up. The drivers work for the entire length that the computer system is turned on.
The functionality of a driver then would depend on the operating system that the computer has. Different Windows versions handle device drivers differently. This is why you have to update all of your drivers once you upgrade your operating system. Following the same concept, you can’t use a Windows driver for a Macintosh and vice versa.
