After painstakingly installing printer drivers for a thermal printer at work I realized I still don’t truly understand what I was installing. (Bonus points if you can cover video card drivers too cause idk what drivers are In that sense either)
In: 2515
Your operating system and programs know what they want done. Your printer or video/sound card have functions they can do. The drivers are the translation or cord connecting the two.
Your OS will usually try to make sure it has all the right drivers, by squinting at what’s plugged into it and comparing it to types of devices it knows about. If it guesses wrong, or can’t figure out what the device is (because it’s too new, or old, or from a small manufacturer, etc),that’s when you get called in to install different drivers.
Think of trying to get around, somewhere you don’t speak the language, back before the internet. The drivers are the little phrasebook you carry around. Having the right one for the right language that covers the tasks you want to do is the best case – but maybe you might be able to scrape by sometimes with a lower quality book that only has very simple/basic phrases, or one in the wrong language, as long as you luck out and someone happens to understand, or you manage to cludge together the phrase you need out of what fragments you have.
Latest Answers