5. Drivers

A driver is another essential piece of system software

As we said earlier, the operating system acts as a link between the hardware and software enabling both to communicate and do their tasks.  

A driver is a specially written program which translates the commands from the operating system into commands that the hardware will understand. 

Each piece of hardware e.g. printer, monitor, scanner, keyboard etc will have its own driver.  Printers from different manufacturers work in different ways, so a printer from manufacturer A will need a different driver than printer from manufacturer B.

If you try to use a device without the correct driver, then it probably won’t work.  If you do manage to get your new printer working without installing its driver, it will probably just print you gobbledygook!

This is what comes out of a printer with the correct driver installed:

This is a printout

This is what comes out of the printer with the incorrect driver installed:

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Can you spot the difference?

When a new operating system such as Microsoft Vista is first released, the software developers will have been working closely with the hardware manufacturers and so the operating system will contain all of the drivers needed for the hardware currently on the market.  However, operating systems are only released every 3-4 years and so the operating system will not contain the drivers for any new hardware developed after its release.

When you buy a new piece of hardware, it will usually come with an installation disk which will load the new drivers into the operating system.  Very often, you can also download the drivers from the internet.