Hello everyone and welcome once again to my blog where each day we try to learn a little bit more about our computers in a fun and easy way. Today we are discussing how hardware gets recognized by our computer and our operating system(windows, mac, linux, etc). In order for a piece of hardware such as a printer, keyboard, camera, etc to be recognized as a device your operating system requires a small file which first indentifies the hard ware and tells your computer how to interact with it.
Lets go through an example of say how a printer get installed to your PC. Before we move on when I say something gets installed think of it as a device becoming physically and virtually connected to your PC. A cable would be a physical connection and a driver would be a virtual connection or a connection that you cannot see, but let us continue with a printer install with the help of drivers.
The driver sofware would first get installed to the computer, but way of cd, disk, etc. The hardware would then be physically connected to the computer. The printer would pass instructions to the driver software and in turn the driver software would talk to your OS(windows, linux, you get the idea now :)) and the OS would interface with you.
That is a very basic breakdown of how drivers work, but if you have any questions or would like a further in depth explanation please feel free to post a comment or email me :) I like emails :).
Until next time
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