How necessary is upgrading drivers?

[Blueboy]

Recently I had to upgrade my nForce4 Ultra drivers to eliminate a problem being caused by the nVidia Network Access Manager(was getting blue screen of deaths). I also upgraded my AMD drivers for my cpu, my video drivers for my 7800GT, as well as a couple hotfixes from Microsoft for running a dual core processor in WinXP.

This caused a few problems for me, the worst being Internet Explorer becoming unusable. I also lost a small amount of performance. After trying various "fixes" and having no success, I did a system restore to the point just before I installed all of the above upgrades. Everything is working again except I'm still getting the BSOD when I use a program that downloads large amounts of information in short time periods(ie. kazaa, emule, etc).

My question is, how crucial are processor updates, nForce4 ForceWare updates, and the other various "fixes" that Microsoft recommend? And also, if anyone knows what may have caused the problem with Internet Explorer, could you post a possible fix in case I run into it again after retrying the updates? Thank you!

 

[pscowboy]

My experience has been to only upgrade drivers to fix an exact, particular problem.

Just because newer drivers are available doesn't mean you should get them. Very often they create problems where none were.

 

[Blueboy]

I'm beginning to see that now lol. I'm going to try to update the nForce again though, as it did fix the BSOD problem nicely. I'll skip the other updates however and see how it goes. Thanks!

 

[Cody_7]

I agree with pscowboy. Upgrading drivers rarely help me, and as a matter of fact, they almost always cause more problems than before. Most of the time i end up downgrading drivers

That's my experience with Video Card drivers at least, but i'm sure the same thing happens with CPU updates, etc.