How to Update PC Drivers Safely - and Which Ones to Leave Alone

A driver is not an app. There is no new feature waiting for you.

It is the small piece of code that lets Windows talk to one piece of your hardware, and when it already talks fine, changing it can only go sideways.

So the whole job is knowing which handful genuinely benefit from being current, and having a way back when one of them does not.

The one rule that prevents almost every driver disaster

If it works, do not update it.

That sounds lazy, and it is the opposite. A driver update swaps out working code for newer code that has been tested on a thousand configurations - none of which is yours.

Most of the time nothing happens, which is exactly why people keep doing it. When something does happen, it is a black screen, a dead Wi-Fi adapter or a webcam that has stopped existing, and you now have to fix it on a machine that is worse than it was an hour ago.

There are four situations where updating is worth it. Everything outside this list can wait:

• Your graphics driver. This is the real one. Graphics drivers get genuine performance work, fixes for new games, and fixes for video playback and hardware decoding - which is why a stuttering 4K file is often a driver problem rather than a player problem.
• Your chipset driver, after a fresh Windows install or a new build. Windows ships generic versions of these and they are fine until they are not. See the section below - the symptoms are strange enough that nobody connects them to a driver.
• A device that is actually misbehaving. Sound cutting out, a mouse stuttering, a card reader nothing sees. A driver update is a reasonable first thing to try when a specific device is wrong.
• A security advisory that names your hardware. Rare for consumer gear, and when it happens it usually arrives through Windows Update anyway.

Printers, motherboard audio, network adapters, card readers, webcams, Bluetooth - if they work, they are done. There is no prize for having the newest one.

Before you touch anything: the two-minute safety net

This is the part people skip, and it is the difference between a bad driver being a five-minute annoyance and a bad driver being an evening.

1. Make a restore point now. Press Start, type restore point, open Create a restore point, pick your system drive, click Create and give it a name you will recognise.
2. Write down what you are replacing. In Device Manager, right-click the device, choose Properties, then the Driver tab. Note the Driver Version and Driver Date before you change anything.
3. Know where the undo button lives. It is on that same Driver tab, and it is called Roll Back Driver. You want to have seen it once before you need it.
4. Update one thing at a time. Two drivers at once means you do not know which one broke it, and you end up undoing both.

Route 1: let Windows do it, which is fine more often than people admit

Windows Update installs drivers on its own, and for most hardware in most machines that is the right answer and the end of the story.

It is deliberately conservative. Microsoft ships the version that has been through testing rather than the version that came out on Tuesday, which is why it sometimes looks out of date and is usually the reason your PC is stable.

There is a second list that does not install itself, and almost nobody knows it is there:

1. Open Windows Update. Start, then Settings, then Windows Update.
2. Go into Advanced options. Check that Receive updates for other Microsoft products is on.
3. Open Optional updates. It sits under Additional options. Expand Driver updates if the section is there.
4. Take the ones you have a reason for. Not all of them. If a device is behaving, leave its entry unticked.

Route 2: get the graphics driver from the people who made the card

This is the one case where going around Windows Update is clearly better, and it is not close.

Graphics vendors ship updates constantly, and their own updater will always have a newer build than Windows Update does. Everything below assumes you already know which card you have - if you do not, Device Manager, then Display adapters, will tell you.

If you have an NVIDIA card, the NVIDIA App is the updater now. GeForce Experience was retired in December 2024, and in May 2026 the NVIDIA Control Panel went too - driver settings for GeForce cards live in the app and nowhere else. Any guide still telling you to open GeForce Experience was written before that and has not been touched since.

NVIDIA also ships two driver lines, Game Ready and Studio, and picking the wrong one is harmless but pointless. Our guide to which NVIDIA driver you actually need settles it in about a minute.

If you have an AMD card, AMD Software: Adrenalin Edition is both the driver and the control panel, and it checks for its own updates. One download covers the whole thing.

If you are on Intel graphics - which is most laptops and any desktop without a separate card - the Intel Graphics Driver package is the one to take. On a laptop, check the maker's support page first: some vendors ship a modified version and Intel's generic build can undo their tweaks.

The driver nobody thinks about, and the one that causes the strangest bugs

Chipset drivers are the ones that make your motherboard's own parts work - USB controllers, power management, sleep behaviour, how your CPU and storage are scheduled.

When they are missing or generic, nothing crashes. Things just go quietly wrong in ways nobody connects to a driver: USB devices dropping out, the machine waking itself at night, sleep not working, an SSD that benchmarks slower than it should, fans behaving oddly.

Windows installs a generic set and never mentions it. That is why a fresh install can feel subtly worse than the machine did before, with no error anywhere to point at.

On AMD, this is a real download you have to go and get. The AMD Ryzen chipset drivers package covers Ryzen and Threadripper boards, and it is the single most worthwhile install on a newly built or newly reinstalled AMD machine.

On Intel, it mostly arrives through Windows Update as the Chipset Device Software, so there is usually nothing to do. If Device Manager is showing unknown devices after a fresh install, that is when to go to your motherboard maker's support page.

When it goes wrong: undoing a driver in under a minute

Windows keeps the previous driver package when it replaces one, precisely so you can put it back.

1. Open Device Manager. Right-click the Start button and pick it from the menu.
2. Find the device and open its properties. Right-click it, choose Properties, then the Driver tab.
3. Click Roll Back Driver. Answer the reason prompt with anything, and let it restart if it asks.

If Roll Back Driver is greyed out, there is no previous package stored - usually because the new driver was installed by a vendor installer that cleaned up after itself. Download the older version from the vendor and install that instead; every vendor keeps an archive of previous releases.

Do I need one of those driver updater programs?

Usually not, and the honest answer is more interesting than either of the ones you normally get.

Windows Update covers ordinary hardware. The graphics vendors cover graphics cards better than anyone else can. Between them, that is most of what is on a normal PC, and a program that scans for outdated drivers is mostly finding ones that are outdated and working perfectly.

There are three situations where one earns its place, and they are narrow but real:

Whatever you use, the rule from the top of the page still applies. A scan that reports thirty outdated drivers is not a list of thirty problems, and ticking all of them is how a working PC becomes a broken one.

Afterwards: the gigabytes nobody tells you about

Every time a driver is replaced, Windows keeps the old package in a hidden folder called the driver store. It never removes them.

On a machine that has been through a few years of graphics driver updates, that folder can hold several gigabytes of versions nothing will ever load again. You can see the scale of it yourself - open a Command Prompt and run:

pnputil /enum-drivers

Clearing it by hand is risky, because deleting a package that is actually in use takes the device with it.

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