Dell Inspiron 9300 Owner's Manual

Also see for Inspiron 9300: Owner's manual Service manual Service manual

Contents

72 Solving Problemsw w w . d e l l . c o m | s u p p o r t . d e l l . c o mDriversWhat Is a Driver?A driver is a program that controls a device such as a printer, mouse, or keyboard. All devices requirea driver program. A driver acts like a translator between the device and any other programs that usethe device. Each device has its own set of specialized commands that only its driver recognizes.Dell ships your computer to you with required drivers already installed—no further installation orconfiguration is needed.Many drivers, such as the keyboard driver, come with your Microsoft® Windows® operatingsystem. You may need to install drivers if you:• Upgrade your operating system.• Reinstall your operating system.• Connect or install a new device.Identifying DriversIf you experience a problem with any device, identify whether the driver is the source of yourproblem and, if necessary, update the driver.1 Click the Start button and click Control Panel.2 Under Pick a Category, click Performance and Maintenance.3 Click System.4 In the System Properties window, click the Hardware tab.5 Click Device Manager.6 Scroll down the list to see if any device has an exclamation point (a yellow circle with a [!]) onthe device icon.If an exclamation point is next to the device name, you may need to reinstall the driver orinstall a new driver. See the following subsection, "Reinstalling Drivers."Reinstalling DriversNOTICE: The Dell Support website at support.dell.com provides approved drivers for Dell™ computers.If you install drivers obtained from other sources, your computer might not work correctly.You can reinstall drivers in the following ways:• Use Windows XP Device Driver Rollback.• Reinstall drivers manually.