why are the driver dates on my pc different then the ones I downloaded?

[shadybk]

I built a pc last week and everything was working fine until I started playing games. As soon as I play a game I get a bsod within the first 15 minutes and it's a different error every time. I went to look if my drivers have any updates and nothing, but I noticed that for example my network adapter driver date says 6/18/2015, even though I downloaded the LAN driver from my motherboard's official website from my other computer and put it on a flashdrive then installed the drivers onto my new pc, All of the driver dates on driver manager are from previous ones than the ones I dowloaded from the asrock site here
http://www.asrock.com/mb/Intel/Z170%20Pro4S/?cat=Download&os=Win1064

Even my amd drivers say 12/4/2015 even though I downloaded the drivers from the amd site which claims they are from 12/17/2015, does this make any sense?
http://support.amd.com/en-us/download/desktop?os=Windows+10+-+64

thanks in advance!!!

 

[johnbl]

Two main reasons, the date the setup installer was created is different from the date the driver was compiled.

In the case where you install a driver but the date of the running driver does not change: often, you have to go into control panel,device manager and select the new driver as the default. This happens a lot with sub drivers and network drivers.
The last time I looked at my machine my Ethernet card had 12 drivers I could select from for my one card. 6 were Intel drivers and 6 were Microsoft generic drivers. Windows 10 makes it easier to see the version numbers in the UI, older versions of Windows you just see all the drivers and no version info so you get to guess which one to select. Or use the pnputil.exe to remove the old driver packages. Sub drivers can be worse, they are associated with each port and get hidden when the device is unplugged but still cause problems if they have bugs.

Plug and play is pretty fast, when people uninstall a driver, the system often detect that and reinstalls the driver in just about 3 seconds. You often need to disable pnp so you can uninstall and install a new driver, then turn pnp back on.

Fort these various reasons, I of then have people remove old driver packages using pnputil.exe.