It is very common that when a customer wants to save money, he calls a friend, often very young, who is very inexperienced and downloads a series of driver programs for Windows which are not only useless, but often they are even harmful to the “health” of the computer.
Unfortunately this is not unusual and is mainly due to two reasons:
- little desire to spend money from those who want a service (which for obvious reasons will not be of quality);
- inexperience of the pseudo technician on duty (often a young boy).
So here Windows is installed without a license, ditto Microsoft Office, and here are the inevitable KMS extension to create further damage to devices that (often) are already underperforming themselves; this kind of error is not considered as such because both the boy and the customers do not consider it a “mistake”.
One of these “errors”, not surprisingly, is to install drivers
Where do these notorious Windows driver programs get their fame?
As already mentioned, to begin with, the fame of these programs derives precisely from the inexperience of both the users and the improvised technicians, secondly, although the internet is full of guides, very often out of laziness they are not read, and you can easily imagine the consequences.
Complicating matters is the fact that, unfortunately, the various webmasters of the sites of these little programs they are very skilled at setting keywords well, and often pay to sponsor so that they come out among the first places in the Google search “ranking”.
It therefore happens that the unfortunate person (whether user or pseudo technician matters little), feels “reassured” by seeing that there are programs that allow you to install drivers without “effort”, this (false) security turns into “ah, well, I don’t have to be technical to use this thing“, problems often start after installing these drivers.
What’s the problem with all this? Unfortunately these programs, when they download the drivers, often do so from unofficial and often dubious sources, causing a series of significant problems (slowness, blue screens, applications that don’t work, and so on).
In the end these programs are useful or not?
Without preamble: no, these types of software are usually not needed and are even harmful, as mentioned at the beginning.
Furthermore, it is very probable that some of these programs that promise “miraculous” Windows driver installations are trojans, spyware, or malware by disguising themselves as something legitimate, they create a variety of cybersecurity problems.
Indeed, there is no need for great Windows environment skills for these applications: more than starting an .exe file and following the installation procedures and little else, there is not much to know, creating a curious “sense of security” in the end user, user of these services.
So what to do to install legitimate drivers?
For starters, avoid these programs that promise these “miraculous” installations like the plague.
Secondly always check the official sources of the drivers of the various devices and peripherals.
For example, do you have an Nvidia video card? Just go to the Nvidia website and download the various tools that allow you to update your drivers.
Do you have an HP monitor? Same speech.
It must be said that by now Windows itself, in its latest versions, “undertakes” to search for drivers on its own, subject to an internet connection, if this were not the case, however, the various official sources of the various manufacturers remain, from which it is possible to draw so that you can download the right drivers to make your devices perform.
In case some drivers are not found automatically, just go to “device manager”, and right-click going to properties.
After that, an additional dialog box will appear: just go to the “details” box and on properties go to “Hardware ID”
Once you get there, copy-paste the ID that comes up on Google (or a search engine of your choice), this will help you search for an unknown driver.
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