Last night, I tried to set up an older printer to a new laptop, but I kept running into driver issues. I’ve always dealt with that, but never understood what it was and why it was necessary.
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The operating system on your computer can’t be pre-built to know every piece of hardware you could attach to it and how that hardware works. There’s just too many gadgets out there. The solution is to have drivers, which are bits of code that act as an interpreter between the operating system and the hardware. It allows the operating system to know how to send the correct signals to get the hardware to work in the intended way.
“But why do I need a specific driver for a specific printer?”
General printer drivers exist and can sometimes be used. The problem is a general driver can’t account for all the differences between every printer made, and will often mess up if you’re using a printer with any unusual features. Similarly, if you were to learn some basic, general-purpose Spanish, it would work a lot of the time, but you’d have trouble dealing with country specific slang, or technical jargon, or pidgin or creole versions of Spanish, so you might want to get a translator that knows that specific area of the language you need to deal with.
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