I’ve had some problems with the sound on my PC and am wondering if I have an outdated device driver for my sound card. How can I check and update my drivers as needed on Win10?

1. Show Drivers On This Computer Free

How to List All Installed Windows Drivers. Luckily there’s a built-in utility that will spit out a list of all the installed drivers, and it couldn’t be simpler. All you need to do is open up a command prompt and type in the following: driverquery. That will give you a list of the drivers and date associated to each. The main view shows you all drivers, version and manufacturer. DriverView let you save the report in various formats, highlighting non-Microsoft Drivers, hiding the Microsoft Drivers from the list, as well as providing you a direct search link to Google. Which comes in handy if you should happen to find a suspicious driver of unknown. Windows Computer folder, by default, displays your basic hard drives. But if you want to show all the drives, including the empty ones, like say a memory card reader, in your Explorer, you can do. In a computer, a driver is a piece of software that tells hardware how to run on a certain operating system. That means your PC card, DVD drive, video card and other hardware all use drivers to make their operations work. If you're using your computer right now, you probably have a ton of drivers already installed and working.

If you haven’t added a new peripheral in the last few years, you’ll be surprised to know that one of the great improvements in Windows 10 is that users don’t have to pay attention to device drivers. There are so many third party apps offering to keep your drivers updated (and many of them are spyware or malware too, but that’s another story) but they’re rarely if ever needed with Win10. In fact, when you get a Windows system update, part of what’s updated are your device drivers, though, confusingly, it doesn’t indicate as such when you look to see what’s new.

Still, there are also ways you can check and force a driver update if necessary and you can also contact customer support if you’re having a problem with a particular peripheral too! My favorite option: If the company offers live chat, use that. WAY more responsive than an email into the abyss.

So the first step on ensuring that your drivers are up to date is to make sure that your copy of Windows is completely up to date too. That’s done with “Windows Update”:

I’m up to date, so this computer’s good to go. Definitely a good thing anyway, because one of the big reasons to update is to install the very latest security patches and virus definitions for Windows Defender…

You can check individual drivers too in Windows 10, though the interface is a bit, um, old school. Start by doing a search for “Device Manager“, as shown:

You want to select the control panel Device Manager, which opens up a window that looks like it’s from Windows 3.1 or that era:

Wade through the list to find the device or devices you want to check. For a sound card you’ll want to look at “Sound, video and game controllers“, almost at the bottom of the list. In case you haven’t encountered one of these windows before, click on the “>” and it’ll expand below with one or more device drivers in that category. Then right click and you’ll see a menu of device driver options: