For example, you might need to install drivers in Windows 7 for a piece of hardware if you’re troubleshooting a problem with the device, if a driver isn’t automatically installed during a Windows installation, or if a driver update enables new features you’d like to utilize. This procedure should take less than 15 minutes for most kinds of hardware. If you’d rather a program update the driver for you, try a free driver updater tool. See How to Find and Download Drivers From Manufacturer Websites if you need help. As you can see in the screenshot above, we’ve visited Intel’s site to download the driver for an Intel-based network card. The download came in the form of a single, compressed file. So, before you can update the drivers for a specific piece of hardware, you have to extract the files from the download you completed in the previous step. Windows 7 has built-in compression/decompression software, but we prefer a dedicated program like the free 7-Zip, mainly because it supports so many more formats than Windows 7 does natively. There are plenty of free file extractor programs out there if you don’t care for 7-Zip. Regardless of the program used, you can usually right-click on the downloaded file and choose to Extract the files to a folder. Be sure to create a new folder to extract the files to, and make sure you choose to create the new folder somewhere you’ll remember. In Windows 7, hardware management, including updating drivers, is accomplished from within Device Manager. Navigate through the hardware device categories by using the > icon. Under each hardware category will be the one or more devices that belong to that category. Choose Browse my computer for driver software. This option will allow you to manually select the driver you want installed—the one you downloaded in the first step. By manually selecting the driver to install, you can be sure that the best driver, the one directly from the manufacturer that you just downloaded, is the driver that will be installed. [1] The name of this screen will be different depending on the kind of hardware you’re updating the drivers for. A more generic Select the device driver you want to install for this hardware is common. Long story short: If nicely named folders exist, get your way to the one that makes the most sense based on your computer. If you’re not that lucky, don’t worry about it, just navigate to the folder with the extracted driver files. INF files are the only files that Device Manager accepts for driver setup information. So while you may know that a folder you’ve selected has all sorts of files in it, it’s an INF file that the Update Driver Software wizard is looking for. Not sure which INF file to choose when there are several? It really doesn’t matter which INF file you open, since Windows will only actually use the appropriate one from the folder. Couldn’t find an INF file in the folder you selected from your driver download? Try looking in another folder within the extracted drivers. Maybe you chose the wrong one. Couldn’t find an INF file in any folder from the extracted driver files? The driver download may have been damaged, or you may not have extracted them properly. Try downloading and extracting the drivers again. See Steps 1 and 2 again if you need help. You might notice the path to the folder you chose in the last step in the text box. Windows is using the information included in the INF files you provided in Step 12 to copy the proper driver files and make the proper registry entries for your hardware. Select Close to close this window. You’re not finished yet! You need to restart your computer and make sure your hardware is working properly with its new drivers. The driver update process involves changes to the Windows Registry and other important areas of your computer, and restarting is a good way to confirm that updating drivers hasn’t negatively impacted some other area of Windows. In this example, since we updated the drivers for the network card, a simple test of the network or the internet in Windows 7 should prove that things are working properly. Were you trying to fix a Device Manager error code but a driver update didn’t work? If a driver update didn’t fix your problem, return to the troubleshooting information for your error code. Most device manager error codes have several possible solutions.
