Printer Drivers

Whenever you connect any kind of external device to your PC, you need to have a driver installed on your computer in order to make the device function.

The driver is the software that you install either from a CD that comes with the device when you buy it or from the manufacturers web site that enables your machine to communicate with it.

Printer drivers are sometimes surprisingly complicated pieces of software, and because they are sometimes written in a hurry, they are quite commonly inadequately tested as well. Thus, they can lead to a wide variety of problems occurring.

How To Update Printer Drivers

You can certainly try updating your printer driver, or even download and re-install the old one again. Either of these actions might fix your problems, but equally, they may not.

To make sure you have the most up to date driver available, in the fastest amount of time try the ‘Driver Installer’ for free, and it will automatically locate and update every driver on your system.

Printer Driver Issues

When you first connect a new printer to your machine, you then need to install the appropriate driver to make it work properly.  It is this driver program that ensures that all of the print jobs that are sent from your PC to the printer are ‘understood’ by that printer correctly, and that what you see on the screen is what is actually printed onto the paper.

When you send a print job to your printer, all that happens is that you send a command to Windows, which then passes that on to your printer driver.  This driver ‘knows’ all about the specific printer that you are working with and it converts or translates the standard Windows drawing command so that the message that the printer receives is in a format that it can understand and work with.

Printer drivers are sometimes surprisingly complicated pieces of software, and because they are sometimes written in a hurry, they are quite commonly inadequately tested as well.  Thus, they can lead to a wide variety of problems occurring.

Common Printer Driver Problems

Here are a few of the most commonly encountered printer problems that are likely to be caused by a damaged or failing printer driver:

• Grid lines missing when you attempt to print a chart or diagram.
• The printout is populated by numerous solid black boxes.
• Non-standard or even nonsensical characters appear.
• The last character or several characters from a line are missing.

It is even possible for errors and defects that lead to a printer program crash to be very specific.

For example, you may see an error occur and re-occur when you are attempting one specific type of print job, whilst other print jobs are handled perfectly normally. In a similar manner, you might find that some fonts cause errors or crashes whilst others do not.

On top of all of these potential printer driver errors, it might simply be that the driver you are using is outdated, and that the version you are working with is inherently bug laden anyway!

Taken as a whole, this means that printer driver errors can be extremely difficult to track down and isolate.

Printer Driver Automatic Updater

That is why a resource like the ‘Driver Installer’ which is available as a free download to try is so useful.

This program checks all of the drivers that you currently have on your machine, before repairing all those that need to be fixed and updating those that are outmoded.

Thus, it does the whole job for you saving you what might otherwise be hours of stress and frustration.  For that reason alone, the ‘Driver Installer’ program is thoroughly recommended.