Picture this; it’s Saturday morning; you walk into your kitchen, make your cup of coffee or maybe tea; I am a coffee drinker. You walk to your computer to log in and do a little bit of work. You realize that your Wi-Fi is no longer working; you sigh, take a sip of your coffee or tea and reboot your computer thinking that it’s just being a pain in the rear. You wait for it to reboot and log back in, but you still have no Wi-Fi to connect to. Your wireless driver is just Gone; it’s like it ghosted you. Now what? This was how my Saturday morning started. I had to do a remote session with someone to look at their laptop and why it kept dropping their Wi-Fi; how ironic that my wireless driver would vanish in the middle of the night. For me, this isn’t a big deal; I just ran an Ethernet cable to my docking station so that I could have a hardwired internet connection. This would be an inconvenience for most people, and they might not have an Ethernet cable, or they might not even have an Ethernet port on their laptop.
After getting my client straightened out, I decided to go to Dell’s website and see what was up. I did the automatic driver detection, which told me another BIOS firmware update was ready to be installed. I ran that update, but the automatic detection didn’t even hint that my wireless driver was missing. I downloaded the driver manually and ran the installation, then let my laptop reboot to complete the BIOS update.
Unfortunately, things like this still happen for no reason, and it’s incredibly frustrating. I would have been more frustrated had I been at a client trying to pull something up; luckily, I was just at home, with my morning cup of coffee, and I had a fast workaround. I know you might be thinking, get to the point, I run windows updates. Well, did you know that running windows updates will not update the drivers on your computer?
Updates are critical.
Many IT people might tell you that doing updates is not critical; I’m afraid I have to disagree. Windows releases updates to patch vulnerabilities all the time. I know how easy it is to ignore these updates. Still, there are reasons that these updates are released, just like you should change the oil in your car every 3000 or 6000 miles respectively when you don’t. Your oil gets low; it can cause problems with your vehicle; ignoring updates can cause issues with your computer and make your network vulnerable to security breaches.
Driver Specific Updates need to be done.
When I was on Dell’s website downloading the driver for my wireless and Bluetooth card, I noticed that dell had the updated driver listed as “urgent” and that this had just been released in February. Several BIOS firmware updates have recently been released for my specific laptop, and firmware updates are listed for specific hard drives.These driver-specific updates are critical to your computer performing well, but most people don’t know about them, or they don’t feel comfortable doing them, and that is entirely okay. You should have an IT tech who checks this for you and routinely makes sure your computer is up to date in every aspect as well as the other devices on your network. You should also have virus and malware scans scheduled to run routinely
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