Driver-Install-Software.com

For some time now, I’ve been having issues in which my HP MediaSmart Server (powered by Windows Home Server) would experience less-than-stellar network throughput and even fail to respond at times. Given the fragile nature of Windows Home Server and value I place on my data, I dared not deviate from the baseline HP configuration. Until now.

Given this was clearly a network-related issue, I checked out the SiS191 network adapter in Device Manager. I was shocked to find HP baselined the server on drivers over a year old. I ran a benchmark using AIDA32 3.92 from my desktop to the server (connected via CAT-5 @ 100mbit through a customized Linksys WRT54G).

Figure 1 - Old drivers…

Figure 2 - Network performance on old drivers is all over the place…
Average speed: 6301.3 KB/s

According to SiS, the latest driver for SiS191 chipsets is 2.0.1039.1100 dated 03/03/2008 (Update 3/31: The download package on their site is dated 03/11/2008). After ignoring all the warnings and legalese on SiS’s website, I down’ed the package, remoted into my server, installed the driver, and rebooted, fingers crossed. The server went down, flashed its cute LEDs in a multitude of scary colors (e.g. red), and came back up… without issues. I ran a second benchmark to see if there were any improvements. And there were!

Figure 3 - Network performance on newer drivers, much more stable. Oh and faster!
Average speed: 6436.1 KB/s

Figure 4 - Before and after overlay (rough).
Green = new // Red = old.

As you can see, the newer drivers yielded an increase in average speed and a much more stable level of throughput. It appears my server-went-to-sleep syndrome has disappeared as well. What were your results?

Microsoft Windows Vista started out with a litany of problems related to, among other things, device driver incompatibilities. While in the last year many of the most common driver problems have been solved, you may still incur strange or erratic problems related to drivers in Windows Vista.

When you’re troubleshooting a problem in Vista that you suspect is related to a driver, you can find detailed information about it and any specific driver being used in the system by going to Device Manager, selecting the device from the list, and drilling down to the device’s Properties sheet. While this technique is fine when you’re looking for information on one specific device driver, it’s not very efficient when you’re seeking information on a number of device drivers.

To make the task of gathering information on a number of device drivers easier, you can use a native command-line tool called Driver Query or you can use a nice little third-party utility called DriverView. In this edition of the Windows Vista Report, I’ll show you how to gather detailed information on drivers using these two tools.

This blog post is also available in PDF format in a TechRepublic download.
Using Driver Query

Driver Query is a command-line tool (Driverquery.exe) that is designed to provide you with a detailed list of all the device drivers installed on a local system or on any system on a network. To do its job the Driver Query provides you with a series of command-line parameters. Of course, you can use the Driver Query command without any parameters, but using them allows you to get more specific details as well as format the results.

For example, using the /si parameter provides information on just the signed drivers. Using the /v parameter (verbose mode) provides more details. Using the /fo parameter allows you to format the results as a list or to save the results in a CSV file (Comma Separated Values) so you can open them in a spreadsheet application such as Excel. (If you want to do any type of detailed analysis, you should save the results as a CSV file.)

To create a spreadsheet file containing information about only the signed drivers, you would open a Command Prompt window and type the command:

Driverquery /fo csv /si > signeddrivers.csv

To create a spreadsheet file containing detailed information about all the installed drivers, you would use the command:

Driverquery /fo csv /v > alldrivers.csv
Using DriverView

DriverView is a lightweight utility with a simple GUI interface for viewing detailed information about all the installed drivers on your system. There’s no installation procedure, just download the zip file, extract the executable DriverView.exe, and run it. You can download DriverView from the TechRepublic Software Library. (Note that DriverView doesn’t specifically list Windows Vista in its list of requirements, but the most recent edition, 1.14, was created in 2008 and I’ve been running it in Vista without any problems.)

When you launch DriverView, you’ll see a spreadsheet-like display, as shown in Figure A.
Figure A

DriverView uses a spreadsheet-like interface to display driver details.

As you can see, the column headers across the top clearly identify all the information about each driver in the display. By default, the drivers are sorted alphabetically by the name of the driver. However, you can sort by any column just by clicking the column header. A triangle icon indicates whether the sort is ascending or descending.

While all the pertinent information about the driver is displayed in the driver’s row, you can view each individual driver file’s properties as well as the driver’s properties. To view the driver file’s properties, just select the driver and press [F8]. For example, Figure B shows the mouclass.sys file’s properties.
Figure B

From within DriverView, you can display driver file’s properties.

To view just the driver’s properties, just double-click the driver and you’ll see all the driver’s details in a single dialog box, as shown in Figure C.
Figure C

To take a quick look at a driver’s properties, just double-click the driver.

In addition to viewing the driver properties in DriverView’s interface, you can create HTML Reports containing all the drivers in the list or just those drivers that you select. Just pull down the View menu and select that HTML Report option. For example, Figure D shows an HTML report of the AVG driver files.
Figure D

You can easily create an HTML Report containing just those drivers you select.
What’s your take on Vista driver problems?

Have you encountered problems with drivers in Windows Vista? Have you used Driver Query to gather information on a driver? Will you investigate DriverView? Are there other utilities or tools that you use to investigate driver problems? As always, if you have comments or information to share about this topic, please take a moment to drop by the Discussion area and let us hear from you.

Ever buy computer hardware on the used market? If so, I’m sure you are familiar with that sinking feeling you get when you plug it in and your computer fails to recognize it.

DriversPlanet is a website that hosts thousands of drivers for Windows in a well-organized and searchable database. Printers, scanners, soundcards, storage, & joysticks.  They’re all here for multiple versions of Windows, including XP & Vista.

DriversPlanet offers direct downloads whenever it can. In other cases, the site provides a link to the manufacturer’s download page. Granted, you could probably find most of these drivers by running a few quick Google searches, but good luck finding drivers for discontinued products or devices made by companies no longer in business.

Drivers are software programs that enable operating systems and programs installed on them to communicate with various hardware devices, controllers, and peripherals connected to your computer. A driver typically communicates with the device through the computer bus or communications subsystem to which the hardware is connected.

When a calling program invokes a routine in the driver, the driver issues commands to the device. Once the device sends data back to the driver, the driver may invoke routines in the original calling program.

Drivers are hardware-dependent and operating-system-specific. They usually provide the interrupt handling required for any necessary asynchronous time-dependent hardware interface.

Some places where a driver is used on your computer include;
Printers
Video adapters
Network cards
Sound cards
Local buses of various sorts - in particular, for bus mastering on modern systems
Low-bandwidth I/O buses of various sorts (for pointing devices such as mice, keyboards, USB, etc.) computer storage devices such as hard disk, CD-ROM and floppy disk buses (ATA, SATA, SCSI)
Implementing support for different file systems
Implementing support for image scanners and digital cameras

With so many different devices and controllers installed on your system there can be numerous reasons for errors and your drivers not to be working. Some possible problems causing your drivers to not work include;
The device is not properly connected to your computer
The driver you have installed itsealf is faulty
The driver is poorly designed
The driver is incompatible with your operating system
There are problems with the recent driver update
There is a hardware conflict within your system

My 3-year-old Hewlett-Packard PC stopped playing optical discs a couple of months ago. Not only were the built-in DVD and CD-ROM drives out of commission, I couldn’t even get a brand-new external DVD drive to work. I searched and searched for driver updates, but came up empty. It wasn’t until I happened upon a Registry patch on Chris Pirillo’s great Lockergnome site that I got the machine to recognize the optical drives.

The patch was provided by a volunteer who had no affiliation with HP, Microsoft, or the drive vendors. It’s not uncommon for PC experts to tell people to update their drivers, but I wonder if these people ever look for updates themselves.

Here’s another example: I’ve got a Samsung SyncMaster 170MP LCD monitor that I’ve been using for going on five years now. It’s a great little monitor (though at 17 inches diagonal it wasn’t considered “little” when I bought it). Unfortunately, when I upgraded to Vista, I noticed some minor pixel swimming. As PC nuisances go, the dancing pixels are trivial–they’re apparent only where a dark window edge meets a light one–but I’d rather they stopped their shuffling.

I just visited the support section of Samsung’s site only to find that the company doesn’t offer a Vista version of the driver for this model. Nor could I find one at any of the many sites that specialize in device-driver downloads. So I guess I’ll have to put up with the pixel sizzle until I collect enough loose change to buy a new Vista-ready monitor.

Rules for avoiding hardware obsolescence
1) Don’t upgrade your operating system. If the OS didn’t come with the hardware, there’s a great chance that an update will render some of your PC’s components unusable.

2) Don’t expect hardware vendors to support the products you buy from them more than a year after the purchase. In fact, you can’t count on much help from them at all after the standard warranties expire. You may get troubleshooting help from other users of the products, however.

3) Before you buy any hardware, find out when it was originally released. I believe all PC components should come with a freshness date. About a year ago I bought a Linksys router that was reviewed favorably by several independent tech sites–when it was originally released 18 months earlier. In the interim, it was found to require a firmware update, but I didn’t find out about its outdated firmware until I spent a day and a half trying unsuccessfully to install it on my home network. (After I downloaded the update, it worked without a hitch.)

4) Be careful when you mix and match old and new hardware and software. Replacing the hard drive on your trusty-but-ancient PC with an enormous-capacity drive that spins twice as fast as the old one will work only if the system is capable of supporting the faster speed and higher capacity. You may find it’s more efficient to spend the money as part of the cost of a new PC.

5) When all else fails, bug the vendor. Send an e-mail to the company’s support address (but don’t bother calling the toll-free support number unless you have lots and lots of time on your hands). Detail the problem, and ask for a solution. Just don’t expect to be offered one. However, if enough people complain about the same problem, the chances improve that the vendor will actually do something useful, even if it’s simply to offer a discount on a replacement.

Wednesday: The first steps toward a New Year’s resolution to compute in a Microsoft-less (and Apple-less) world.

Do you know what a “driver” is? It’s not just another one of those buzzwords people use to impress you, every computer hardware device in the world has some sort of “driver” associated with it..

Why is that you say?

Well let’s say you build a device that prints and call it a printer. The printer has no idea how to communicate or talk to (1) a PC (IBM compatible computer (2) Mac compatible computer or (3) any other computer or (4) network or other device.

A driver is a software routine that handles communications from/to a device and from/to a specific type of computer.

But of course computers themselves need drivers so they can talk to you. We call those drivers “Operating Sytems” and give them labels such as Window, Mac, Unix, etc. Operating Systems are the ultimate main driver of machines we call computers and “Drivers” refers to the smaller device driver software routine that let a device talk to the computer and the comuter talk to the device.

Got all that? Not sure I do.

Sometimes a Driver doesn’t work properly and the manufacturer of the device or a third party “updates” the Driver to a newer, usually better and often faster and more efficient, version. So from time to time you may want ot check to be sure you have the lastest version of the Driver.

Or you may buy a device and have no way to get it to talk to your computer.

So you need a driver do you? There are a lot of places on the web that let you download drivers including Microsoft who offer a very large list of drivers to make their Windows operating systems work well with just about any device.

We’d sure like to have you add your comment about your experinces with drivers or links to drivers below….