Question If I install all the windows updates, do I get the basic drivers for my chipset, bluetooth, ethernet, etc?

[barkersofgeraldine]

Hi team -

if i download all the updates from windwos after a fresh install, will that mean that i have all the drivers or do i have to look for it manually?

at the moment, i am having trouble accessing the motherboard company's website; and as such, cant just get it off directly from them

thanks for ur help

 

[kanewolf]

Hi team -

if i download all the updates from windwos after a fresh install, will that mean that i have all the drivers or do i have to look for it manually?

at the moment, i am having trouble accessing the motherboard company's website; and as such, cant just get it off directly from them

thanks for ur help

Not usually. You really need the device specific drivers. You might be able to get around the motherboard manufacturer's site by using the drivers from the manufacturer's site. AMD chipset drivers for example.

What motherboard do you have ?

 

[punkncat]

It is best to go to your motherboards support page and download all the base drivers that you need for said.

If this is a new board, the box might have included a USB or disk with those drivers, but this is becoming less common, particularly on lower end or budget option motherboards.

 

[johnbl]

Windows will attempt to install a driver for any device it has in its catalog. This means that third party companies will provide to microsoft a generic copy of a driver to complete the installation. Often the third party will have more current versions on their own website and provide microsoft with updates over time.

microsoft windows update only updates the drivers that are given to microsoft. If you use a 3rd party update program then microsoft no longer updates that driver and you are expected to do manual updates of that driver yourself.
Over time this becomes a major source of problems since people rarely look for updates to the third party drivers until something breaks. When a windows provided driver breaks, the error is reported back to microsoft via the windows error reporting and a fix is pushed back onto machines before other people actually figure out the problem. Most of the problems I see are from the non updated 3rd party drivers or malware that modifies key windows functions.

I would just do a generic windows install, then reboot and go into windows device manager and see if there is some device that is flagged as not being installed. At that point I would go to the motherboard vendors website to install the driver for that device.

One other point: the motherboard drivers know about the hardware on your motherboard and they can make drivers that are specific to your motherboard IE the motherboard might have hardware with known bugs in the chips and the custom driver might work around or turn off the hardware function. This happens often when vendors release a product before a new interface specification change has been finalized. Then the end up having to provide a new driver or make a bios change to prevent a problem. I have seen this happen over and over again with various usb spec changes, bugs in CPU versions, Sleep function changes, bios interface changes, cpu security bug fixes thing like that.

 

[ubuysa]

In addition to the above (by @johnbl), many drivers are not automatically installed by Windows Update. You have to click 'View optional updates' and then expand Driver Updates to see them.