With Driver Booster Pro as the GOTD, once upon a time I'd probably talk about the why, wherefore, & how of updating drivers, but win7 is soon to be EOL, & 1/2 a dozen win10 versions have me more than a bit rattled when it comes to drivers. Things have changed a bit again, so an update…
Windows 7 drivers are still available, but this will change the closer we get to the January 2020 end of support. Since nothing about win7 will change after that, and companies will no longer update drivers, having to even worry about drivers will be rare. That said, if for some reason you need a newer driver version for whatever hardware component, and if the component or PC/laptop manufacturer doesn’t provide one, probably your only hope is that some other PC/laptop manufacturer has something available that might work, fully or partially, and that’s where something like today’s GOTD, Driver Booster Pro, might come in handy. This sort of thing is iffy, so back up first, but it can work. Other than graphics drivers from AMD & Nvidia, I don’t look for much happening with win7 – this close to EOL I don’t imagine many companies are worried about bugs or performance increases.
Windows prior to version 10 had a stability advantage, because in the vast majority of cases, if the drivers that were installed worked on day 1, they’d still work years & years later. That is absolutely not the case with Windows 10. Windows 10 is continuously in development, always changing, unlike earlier Windows versions, which were finished before they were released. At the same time PC & laptop sales have been declining, and the remaining manufacturers are relentless in cutting costs. One way they do that is to use cheaper, often one-off components, and there is no company standing behind many of those components, developing new drivers etc.
What this means if you have a Windows 10 device, is that any major win10 version change may or may not work on that device, usually because of one or more driver issues. It may be getting worse – today the Windows 10 v. 1903 status page lists 16 known issues, 3 of which have been fixed, and many of them are hardware driver related. That does not count less popular devices – Microsoft has to see a pretty large number of identical problem reports before it’ll take notice.
docs.microsoft[.]com/en-us/windows/release-information/status-windows-10-1903
Microsoft has started putting a hold on offering a new win10 version via Windows Update when it detects a known hardware driver issue, so getting stuck in a loop, with win10 trying & failing to upgrade should become rarer. And they’re considering changing the win10 update schedule – this year the fall update is more like a service pack, with the next full version due in the spring of 2020 – so you'd only have this risk once a year instead of twice.
One of the things that you can do, providing you have the hard drive space, is add a Windows 10 Insider build to your device. That’s Not a suggestion for everyone – if your device uses relatively common or popular hardware components it should be quick & easy, but if/when Microsoft does not have all of the needed drivers in their database, this gets pretty involved. The advantage is you get advanced notice [or warning] that the next version will work, or not. Depending on if you choose the Fast or Slow rings, you’ll be able to update that Insider copy of win10 to a newer version maybe once a month or once a week, though you can just ignore that copy of win10 until you’re ready, e.g. check it at 4 months out [before the next version release], then 2 months, then 1 month etc.
As far as updating drivers goes, sometimes Microsoft will do it for you via Windows Update, though the drivers it offers may not be the latest, may not be full versions, may be the incorrect driver etc. And don’t count on Microsoft to check if any drivers in its database are compatible with any future version of win10. Some drivers are only available from AMD. Some drivers are only available from Intel, but you very often must install Intel’s update app to find, download, & install them. You can sometimes roll back to an earlier driver version in Windows Device Mgr. [select the device, then right click -> properties], but not always, & attempting a roll back may screw up Windows. And again, if you update drivers from AMD or Intel, there’s no guarantee they’ll work with the next win10 version, unless that’s specifically why they were released, e.g. AMD released new graphics drivers prior to win10 1903 just for 1903.
When it comes to all the other components not supported by AMD or Intel or Nvidia, and anything besides the chipset & graphics drivers from Intel, you can check the device manufacturer for updated drivers, but most will not issue updates for even slightly older devices. You can try to find downloads on the component manufacturer’s web site, but that’s become rare. Generally the safest approach is to do nothing until you have a problem, or Windows Update updates a driver, then Google or use something like Driver Booster Pro to try and find either something newer, or in the case of Windows Update, if a more complete version of that driver is available.
If a new version of win10 won’t work, you can of course stay on an older version rather than update, or you might replace the offending component – when I say replace, I don’t necessarily mean physically replace, but rather for example, add something like a USB Wi-Fi dongle to take over that function. A significant catch is that it can be very difficult to figure out what component is using an incompatible driver. Very often you can go into the device’s BIOS setup and turn off things like audio, networking, or Bluetooth etc., which might help with diagnosis, & you’d want to do that anyway if you’re going to use something else for that function. If you can get into win10, you can also disable those components in Device Mgr.
Finally, if you’re running win10, in my opinion you should be doing disk/partition image backups. Windows backup, the separate restoration from the boot menu, system restore, and rolling back to the old version after a version upgrade, can all be neat, if they work, but you’re betting the farm on stuff that may not work at all. If it only fails one out of 10, or even 50 times, that’s still too high a failure rate when it’s your device at stake. Use the free Macrium Reflect, or AOMEI if you prefer, verify & store your backups in more than one place, and make sure you can restore them, e.g. that you can boot the device to the USB stick they create etc. And save some of those old backups, especially when you 1st use a new device. The reason I mention that here, is that I’ve had to restore that original backup, and only then would the upgrade to the latest version or win10 work, because only that original backup, when the device was new out of the box, had the original drivers. Where did the offending drivers come from? Windows Update of course.