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 the relationship between peripheral device drives and the layman is restricted to the fact that somebody will sort it for them.

The good news is that it is not necessary for this to be the case, anybody with even a minimum of PC knowledge can install device drivers and not have to call in their computer maintenance expert neighbour to clear up the mess they’ve made of it all.

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?

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. Usually it’s not difficult to find a driver on internet. There are a lot of web sites which contain thousands of them.

A good example is the web site http://www.bravofiles.com/, it’s great for downloading any drivers for many reasons. First of all it’s easy to find the one you need due to the order they are listed in. Secondly it contains about 80 000 drivers free for downloading. And thirdly, the web site is absolutely trustworthy in respect of safety; the possibility to accidentally download a virus with your driver is totally excluded.

A lot of sources are not as reliable, before you start downloading, make sure it’s safe. After downloading the driver you need, check the file with your antivirus system. If everything is ok you can happily use the driver.

The installation is usually very simple, you don’t have to be a programmer to install them. So don’t be afraid to start maintaining device drivers on your computer, it’s fairly straight forward and you don’t’ have to be an expert.