New
#120
IMHO, only if your missing some functionality with a device. About the only driver I manually update to the latest and greatest these days is my Video card driver, and only because I game a little bit. Other than that, its just touch pad drivers so the two finger scroll etc works. At one time I would religiously hunt up the latest driver for all my hardware, mostly because it didn't work with the Windows stock drivers. Those days are pretty well gone now. Even my HP laser printer and all in one install silently in the background first time I turn them on. No messing with the bundled software and bloat programs I don't want. On my desktop PC the VIA onboard sound is the only thing that doesn't work out of the box on a clean install. It's never detected for what ever reason. On my laptop, its just the extra functions on my touchpad. If your a serious gamer, yes you'll likely want to update your drivers, especially chip-set and video. The average Joe, not so much.
If I was installing an OS and I knew I was going to upgrade it to another right away. I wouldn't bother updating any drivers manually at all. Not unless I had to for compatibility.
Updating drivers/BIOS can even cause problems if you don't need the specific tweak(usually for new hardware) it offers. You won't get any new functions for your specific piece of hardware. For example Catalyst only show what my AMD video card was designed for, none of the new stuff shows up.
Definition:
A device driver is a small piece of software that tells the operating system and other software how to communicate with a piece of hardware.
For example, all printers come accompanied with drivers to install that tell the operating system exactly how to print information on the page. Sound card drivers tell your software exactly how to translate data into audio signals that the card can output to a set of speakers.
http://www.techspot.com/article/1002...not-explained/
This from Techspot will add more confusion.