What's the difference between Windows drivers and original manufacturers drivers?

[3hunna]

Hi I was wondering whats the difference between drivers that are automatically installed by the windows & the ones that are provided by manufacturers because I was buying a second hand sound card & the shop keeper told me to bring your pc cause he said the windows driver won't be the same quality as the original driver

 

[CoolmanT]

Windows drivers are mostly for common motherboard-hardware like integrated sound card and USB2.0. If you install your sound card but not installing the manufacturer driver, it won't even work, because your motherboard and Windows don't have the right driver for the sound card, so it won't detect your card. An original driver has a specific driver for specified sound card. In a nutshell, a specific driver from it's own manufacturer is needed.

 

[Agam3mn0n]

Greetings.. Whats the difference between Original drivers and Windows drivers? Ok the short answer is none, but of course the full answer is a little more complex.

By definition a driver for a product that is designed to be installed on Windows IS a Windows driver. However there is a minor distinction between generally available Windows drivers and those provided by the manufacturer of the computing device you are obtaining the driver for.

Drivers provided by the manufacturer of a device are reffered to as original drivers, these are generally the drivers supplied by the manufacturer and shipped with the product when it was new. Lets choose an example. Lets say I bought a sony laptop 4 years ago. That laptop will come with a pre-installed Operating System that is already configured, it will already have drivers installed too, those drivers are referred to as the original drivers.

However Sony may have decided to use a device manufactured by NVidia and NVidia frequently release updated drivers that add extra features or performance benefits. I can go and obtain a driver for my NVidia device from NVidia's web site and install that in place of the driver supplied by Sony.

Sometimes computer manufacturers release a computer with a modified version of a device, in those cases it will only be possible to obtain and use drivers supplied by the computer's manufacturer. The drivers will usually warn you that this is the case when you attempt the install.

 

[3hunna]

Windows drivers are mostly for common motherboard-hardware like integrated sound card and USB2.0. If you install your sound card but not installing the manufacturer driver, it won't even work, because your motherboard and Windows don't have the right driver for the sound card, so it won't detect your card. An original driver has a specific driver for specified sound card. In a nutshell, a specific driver from it's own manufacturer is needed.

@ ''Windows don't have the right driver for the sound card'' well if that's case then tell me why did my win 7 itself install the driver for the my old gpu 8400gs but when I replaced it with a gt 440 the windows didn't install the driver I had to do it manually & when I installed win 8 it automatically installed the gt 440's driver & even brought up an updated driver in it the window's update

 

[ex_bubblehead]

To answer the original question, there is NO difference at all other than the ones obtained directly from the manufacterer will almost always be newer than those available via Windows Update. The drivers available via Windows Update are provided to Microsoft by the manufacturers but are not updated as often as those available directly.