Troubleshooting Drivers

 Troubleshooting Drivers 

Troubleshooting drivers is the art of determining which hardware device driver is causing a

system stability problem. Often, it is quite easy to figure this out. If the hardware works on a

computer with a different operating system but not on Windows Vista, you can conclude that

the hardware is not broken. If the hardware does not work on any operating system, you

would suspect that the hardware was causing the problem.

Hardware device driver problems manifest in several ways:

■ The device the driver manages does not work This diagnosis is relatively simple to make.

For example, when connected to a Windows XP Professional computer, documents sent

to a color laser printer print successfully. When the same printer is connected to a Windows Vista computer, documents sent to the color laser printer do not print. In this situation, you would suspect the driver.

■ The device the driver manages works erratically This is more difficult to diagnose because

it might not happen every time. Over time, however, you would notice that the computer

would sometimes crash when you tried to do the same thing. If the computer crashed

once every five times you tried to print a document, you would eventually figure out that

there was something wrong with the printer driver.

■ Windows Vista encounters a STOP error when the device is being used STOP errors manifest themselves as a blue screen with white text. Often, the text provides a hint as to what has caused the STOP error. By default, Windows Vista dumps kernel memory to %SYSTEMROOT%\MEMORY.DMP and then reboots. One way of ensuring that you get the

details of a STOP error down is to prevent Windows Vista from automatically rebooting.

This procedure is discussed in this lesson’s practice session.

■ Error or warning dialog boxes appear on the screen when the device is in use The error

message might relate to something else, or a program might crash when you attemptsomething involving the device. For example, if an application crashes every time you try

to use one scanner but works fine when you use another, you would suspect that the

driver for the first scanner might be faulty.

■ After a long period of stability, the installation of a new driver causes the computer to

become unstable If a computer has been stable for a long time prior to the installation

of a new driver and errors and crashes start to occur, it is likely that the new driver is

causing the problem.

When you have determined that a hardware device driver is causing the problem, you have

three options. The first is to update to a newer version of the same driver. Updating drivers was

covered earlier in this lesson. The second option is to roll back the driver to a previous version,

one that you know works and does not cause errors. The third option is to completely uninstall the hardware device driver.