Welcome to Driver-Library.com: the free online driver library. This site offers a detailed encyclopedia of
Windows drivers, including what they are used for and which devices they are associated with, while also including information on how to identify and update automatically any outdated drivers on your system.



What is a driver?



The device driver is a piece of software that operates as an intermediary between a computer's operating system, and the underlying hardware and peripherals. Examples of devices which use drivers include internal PC communication buses, data storage devices, printers, monitors, video/sound cards, and motherboards, to name but a few. A "calling" program will call a subprogram in the driver, which will then prompt the driver to send commands to the underlying device. The device may then send information back to the calling program which will, in turn, launch subprograms in the calling program.

Drivers themselves can be thought of as being split into two conceptual layers: the logical layer and the physical layer. At the logical layer the software gives generic instructions to the driver, while at the physical layer the driver will then interpret these generic instructions into something that the specific hardware device, associated with the driver, will understand.

In this way drivers simplify work for software programmers since they don't need to program an application to work with every single possible hardware device, but instead can use a standardized set of high-level (logical layer) commands for a particular category of devices, and then rely on the relevant driver translating these into the low-level (physical layer) commands which can be understood by the underlying hardware device.

Run a FREE scan for outdated drivers on your PC »