What is a Driver ?

Drivers

     A driver is software that works to communicate between an operating system and a peripheral. Think of it as a translator. If you use a crappy driver, your OS won't understand your video card and may become unstable and crash. Hardware manufacturers constantly update drivers to make them faster and more stable.
     There are drivers for printers, the video, sound cards, image scanners, modems, etc. Drivers are regularly updated and new versions can help fix problems and bring significant performance improvements.
     Compatibility problems are the most frequent problems solved by a new driver release. For instance, certain software may not run correctly due to the way they display information on the screen: the problem can be solved either by a new video driver or with a new release of the software.
     Some peripherals rely on the processor computing power (for instance, most inkjet printers). Others peripherals integrate dedicated, specialized chips (for instance, graphics accelerator cards). New drivers optimize the communications speed and task sharing between the processor and the peripheral. A new driver can bring as much as 50% performance increase for certain tasks.
     Consider an application -- Word, FrameMaker, whatever, it doesn't matter -- trying to print a single letter on a sheet of paper. The application would like to simply tell the printer, "Please print a letter D exactly where I tell you. I want it this big and this color. Thanks."
     Without a driver sitting between the application and the printer, the application would have to know everything there is to know about the millions of printers out there. The application could not simply ask for a letter D to be printed, it would have to also tell the printer how to do it. Further, the application would also have to understand the millions of messages that can be sent from the printer to the computer: "I'm done." "I'm out of toner." "I have a paper jam."
     Put another way, it's like a person of one language trying to communicate with many other languages without an interpreter. But a driver fixes all that. The application tells the driver to print a D, and the driver says, "No problem, I know how to talk to the printer. Leave it to me." It acts as the language interpreter, if you will -- the application's single point of contact.

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