Gadgetory

now I've received a number of complaints that my fastest possible episodes haven't been fast enough lately and to that I would reply but you weren't all throwing things at me while I try to film the bloody things maybe we wouldn't have this problem so with that 15 seconds of your valuable life wasted let's get right into it a driver is as Microsoft defines it software that allows your computer to communicate with hardware or devices simple right but why do we even need that so you've got a device let's say a sound card you should be able to just plug it in with no drivers and your music player let's say Winamp should generate a digital signal that says you know yo sup dog I need to e-flat up in this biz or something and the sound card should make that noise right well actually yeah that's basically how it works and if there is only one sound card in existence it pretty much could but there's a problem there are literally thousands of sound devices and all of them will work completely differently from each other the signal that meant a flat in our last example could mean dinosaur onion to another and for everything to work correctly software makers would need to rewrite their software with specialized signalling for your sound card along with every card that ever existed in every card that ever will exist it would be fine if every single software developer was the freaking doctor but this is the real world not by fantasy so that's what a driver is it acts as an abstraction layer or translator that way the makers of your favorite programs only have to interact with your hardware in one standardized language and the driver handles the rest so that sounds relatively simple why do drivers cause so many issues well there are a ton of variables that exist for the programmers on the driver side as well aside from our oversimplified a flat example your hardware is capable of a great deal of amazing stuff all of which we expect to work absolutely perfectly and even though standards exist even if they weren't here to perfectly things like other devices and other pieces of software can cause conflicts and on top of that separate drivers need to be maintained for multiple operating systems like Linux OS 10 windows and the various flavors of each that exists in the wild each with their own universal language that the driver needs to translate to it leaves plenty of room for one of the variants of a driver for a particular piece of hardware to have an imperfection or two and helps me at least understand by sometimes a piece of hardware lacks support for the OS I'm trying to use it with which isn't to say that the lack of an official driver always precludes using the hardware on windows anyway sometimes if you know what you're doing you can force install one and it will mostly work driver files are usually dot INF files and vista drivers can sometimes be used on Windows 7 and Windows 8 and vice versa so pick the correct version of Windows that is to say 32-bit or 64-bit not Pro or ultimate or whatever extract the files from the Installer and give the manual browse feature and device manager a crack before you totally throw up your hands and give up this trick has saved my bacon with wireless network adapters and other things a handful of times speaking of saving my bacon this is from Dollar Shave Club and it contains their wonderful smelling shave butter and the only thing that could be manly or about it would be if it smelled like bacon this majestic 6 blade razor also from Dollar Shave Club on the other hand couldn't be more manly if it smelled like bacon was covered in back hair and belched the Pledge of Allegiance every morning before a breakfast made of bacon Dollar Shave Club saves you time and saves you money by delivering wicked high quality razors and other bathroom supplies directly to your door once per month so you can be shaving with a fresh blade every week without the hassle of running to the store that way if the guy selling you the razor drops f-bombs all over the place brandishes a machete as he packages it and then rocks out with a leaf blower for some reason he is safely on the other side of the country for the Americans or if you're in Canada I guess it would be the other side of the continent and if you're in Australia the other side of the world and if you're anywhere else then I'm sorry there's nothing I can do for you right now but for anyone in those three countries visit dollarshaveclub.com slash linus to learn more and sign up now oh and they also have man do I have to talk about this please don't make me talk about this okay they also have peppermint scented butt wipes for men maybe if I used these instead of normal butt wipes I wouldn't stink and the human interaction made possible by my nan stinkiness would give me the confidence to tell you know again that's dollarshaveclub.com / Linus thanks for watching guys like the video if you liked it dislike it if you disliked it share it if you like machetes and as always don't forget to subscribe to tech cookie for more fast as possible episodes just like this one