It will update to drivers that have been thoroughly tested for your specific machine that Microsoft Windows may not have made available yet. The middle-ground that has worked for me is if your machine manufacturer has it's own update utility, use that. I was one of those users in the past and in some cases it created more headaches than improvements. Many users though, especially gamers, get obsessed with having the latest drivers, especially the graphics card drivers. It's safest (if you run Windows) to just let Windows take care of your driver updates. Unless you are having some sort of an issue with your current driver. Otherwise it creates a customer support nightmare (and brand damage) if they roll out a Windows update with new drivers that cause issues on some setups. They are typically the OLDEST versions of the drivers as Microsoft is typically very conservative to roll out new drivers until they have been tested and 'out in the wild' for a long time. These are the drivers for your components that the Operating System manufacturer has tested. These are typically the newest versions and the manufacturer of your machine may not have adopted them yet.Ĭ) The operating system device drivers (aka Windows Device Drivers for Windows). Such as the driver for your graphics card (like found on the NVIDIA website), or your Intel chipset drivers found on the Intel website. These are the same drivers you see on the drivers page if you go to the manufacturers support drivers web page for your model.ī) The component manufacturer driver.

In actuality, in many cases, you have > 3 < versions of drivers for many components:Ī) The 'OEM' driver from the computer manufacturer which a lot of major brands load their machines with their own update utility.

Intel display driver update