Living with Windows Driver woes

One of my colleagues used to work for MS before and his job was to look at the windows crash logs and determine what went wrong. Most of the time, he used to find out that it was a problem with the processor or the drivers for some hardware components.

As anyone who has ever tried to host servers by themselves know, it is critical to keep them updated so that the PC works fine.

Especially when developers like us install 2008 R2 on a laptop and sometimes not all the drivers get installed properly. Windows Update does not always show missing or out of date drivers.

Do the following which might surprise you:

1) Go to http://www.driverdetective.org/ and install their software. Do not install Norton with it.
2) Scan your laptop/ desktop/ server.
3) In most cases you will find some drivers out of date or not even installed. I saw this with a brand new server from Dell which did not have the chipset drivers installed.

Once you find what is out of date or missing, it is easy to search on the OEM site (Dell, HP, etc) and then install the latest drivers.

BIOS updates are especially important if you have problems on your PC already. I have seen the older the PC, the more impact such updates have on its performance and stability.

And for sure, as my friend knows - if you see an Intel update - definitely install it for sure.

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