What is a driver and how to download it?

For people who don’t understand anything about computers and peripherals this term might be unknown however this software is very useful and essential utility if you want to run a printer off your PC. Usually for a layman the relationship between drives and themselves are restricted with this sort of conversation:

• Hey, Fella, my printer is not working after I’ve restored my computers hard drive, can you fix it?

And in couple of minutes:

• Hey, that was quick! What have you done?
• I installed a driver for your printer.
• Wha… Wha… What are you talking about?
• In other words, I helped your Operating system to find your printer.
• Ah right, thanks dude!

If you find this example a little bit exaggerated, good for you, you are not one of those people.

So let’s make it clear what a driver is.

Basically a driver is kind of a software which helps your Operating System (like Windows) to find hardware which you have connected to your PC or Laptop. Without this tiny utility you can’t use your printer, scanner, web camera or any other peripheral.

The driver disc is always a part of the printer packaging (or any device, not only printers). All you have to do is to run the disc and follow the step-by-step instructions which will give you all information you need.

Quite often though it happens that you don’t have a driver, it might be due to different reasons, you may have lost the original disc or you could have bought the printer secondhand and the driver disc was missing. It’s easy to understand, the disc is small and you don’t use is every day, not even every week. After all you have lots of discs which almost live their own life when they appear and disappear from your desk randomly (with help of other people of course).

What to do if you lost a driver?

Oh my god, you’ve lost a driver! You will never be able to use your printer ever again!

Just kidding.

It’s not a problem at all, not now at least. On the internet you can find any driver you need. Before you start looking for a driver make sure you know which one you need. First check the details about printer you have plugged in. When you know the driver you are looking for, you can start searching on driver bases. I usually use the web site http://www.bravofiles.com/

 

for downloading any of my drivers, just because I know it already and I can trust it rather than downloading from new web sites each time. May be it’s just me being over cautious but I really don’t like to use many different web sites for downloading because you never know if you accidentally download a virus with your driver. The one I mentioned is clear and trustworthy and besides it contains a huge source of drivers. I would recommend it. But it’s your choice, you can Google for other web sites. Let me know if you will find something worthwhile or even better.

-Andy Groaning

-Writer is a famous software archive owner