Yes on all my laptops and any laptops that I fix. Updating drivers can occasionally cause problems, but it's so easy to do a rollback to the previous driver using Device Manager that is is not an issue for me. It is not essential to update drivers, but occasionally a driver update can fix problems such as video glitches or network connectivity problems.
Yes, but not latest and greatest by chipset manufacturers (or shady driver updaters). I stay with my laptop manufacturer and Windows Update to ensure compatibility/stability.
Kind of. I keep my video card drivers up-to-date as I want the best performance for video games. Other drivers I don't really care about.
Only the network drivers.I tend to leave the intel drivers alone and ive experienced problems with sound drivers in the past,so i steer clear of those also.
The problem with that is that usually laptop manufacturers stop providing driver updates for a laptop around 6 months after the laptop is released. This is a problem for people like me who want to use a laptop years after it has been released. If I but a new laptop I would expect to use it for at least 5 years.
Was wondering about the lack of updates, but nothing really worth updating for me anyways. So no may be a better poll choice.
I used to be way too obsessive about driver updates (Specially GPUs) but as time passed i got bored of downloading every single driver and checking for updates so i just update them when i . . . format my PC.
I use driver update software so I don't have to do it manually. I never format my laptop and do a clean install of Windows.
Quite often new video drivers will lead to better video performance, and it is actually rare for new video drivers to give problems.
That might hold true if you're using the most current system supported by that driver. If yours is the older supported system, the opposite often applies. Improvements that help the newer system often come at the expense of the older system. I'm inclined to believe that this is done deliberately to make the new system appear superior. On systems that are supported but are not the most current OS, I've had much better results with slightly older drivers. If I upgrade this unit to the most current video driver, I'll lose half of the available screen resolutions and I'll have to turn down the acceleration to one step above minimum to keep the display from lagging. With the previous driver, I can leave the acceleration at maximum. Unless there's something wrong with your current drivers or there's something that needs real improvement, leave the drivers alone. Most of the time there's little or nothing gained by updating them.
Thats why i sued to update them but the gains are barely noticeable so i said to myself, screw this im not gonna update drivers for half a FPS.
Voted: Yes, up-to-date drivers are important But only on my 17" desktop replacement laptop. The last 2 of these have been bleeding edge at purchase date with discrete graphics. So the driver updates especially graphics, I can discern a visual difference. On all other computers I touch (own, sell, repair) never. Just to get them up & running with a new OS. That's about the only time.
Voted for: Yes, up-to-date drivers are important I use the inbuilt updater if it has one, if not, then I use Driver Booster, Secunia PSI and Windows Update. All seems to work quite well using those
This is also my approach. My newest machine by Samsung has 2 utilities which check the overall system functionality and any available update.
In that case it sounds like you've installed an incompatible driver. This should never happen with the proper driver.
Consider that before long Samsung will stop providing driver updates for your laptop. Lenovo is the only manufacturer I am aware of which provides driver (and also BIOS updates) for older models. For example, one of my Lenovo Thinkpads is 6 years old, but the included system update software still finds new driver updates, and Lenovo even provide Windows 8 drivers for it, even though my model came with XP installed. If I was to replace XP with Windows 8, I could install the Windows 8 version of the System Update software and it would download and install the latest Windows 8 drivers provided by Lenovo.
Wow seems like Lenovo does a great job with their drivers. I hate when i update laptop OSes and you lose almost all the media key functions (And many other special functions/shortcuts) because drivers are not updated by the OEM.
