Had a call from a lady in Chesterton who was having problems with a monitor attached to her Asus laptop. The laptop’s screen worked fine but the external monitor wouldn’t work at all. After connecting another machine to the monitor and using a different HDMI cable, the issue was narrowed down to the laptop itself. On further investigation it appeared that the correct display driver was not installed. The laptop was using the default Microsoft graphics driver, which is what Windows tends to use when it can’t automatically detect and download the correct manufacturer’s graphics driver. So off to Asus’ website to download and install the correct drivers, and all was well.
Not that it’s the case above, but I see a lot of computers and laptops that have some kind of driver updating software installed. This is really not necessary and can actually cause more problems than they solve. When it comes to Windows drivers, the old adage “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it” really does apply. So unless you’re having a particular problem with a piece of hardware, either internal or external, you really don’t need to update the drivers.
A lot of issues with drivers can sometimes be resolved by simply uninstalling the driver in question and then rebooting the computer and then allowing Windows to rediscover the hardware and automatically download and install the correct driver. Sometimes, however, for the more obscure hardware devices, Windows can’t find the driver, so you will need to take a trip to the manufacturer’s website in order to find the device in question and then download and install the correct driver. For older versions of Windows and also older hardware devices this can sometimes be a bit of a challenge. However, there are ways around this, sometimes using a driver for the previous version of Windows will be successful.
Computer Service in Chesterton Cambridge