Determining how important a driver update is

All information on this site is furnished in a general manner and can have errors, oversights and so cannt be expected to cover every specific scenario. Please research any information used with Dell documentation or contact their tech support if any clarification is needed

To Update or Not to Update, that is the question!

Sometimes you will wonder "should I do some preventive maintenence and see if there are newer drivers for my computer?". Some updated drivers can make your system run better but it's difficult if not impossible to give an absolute answer on which ones to update. It can be very hard to determine exactly which ones will make your computer run like a well oiled machine and which ones will grind your system to a halt. It can be argued that "If it ain't broke, don't fix it"... Although to change that to computer terms, I would say "If it ain't broke, create a disk image" or "If it ain't broke, create a full back up" or at the very least, create a system restore point. Do this before you go and tweak around with the software workings of your computer. In general, Dell marks their drivers in terms of relative need so that if a driver fixes a very big problem, it can be marked so that you can know about it.

As in my previous post, to get to your drivers, you'd start at support.dell.com, go to "I'm looking for drivers or downloads" enter your service tag, confirm the Windows version and then start looking through the driver categories by clicking on the "+" symbols next to them. To check the relative importance of an update, you'll see that there's an "importance" field to the right of the name. In general, if you see recommended, it's a good idea and if you see urgent, you should probably run the update. I'll repeat again... sometimes the best ideas can have unintended consequences... so whenever possible "back it up, back it up, back it up" before making major changes to your computer.