A Guide to Finding Printer Drivers

Has your printer recently decided to quit working and you’ve gone through all the mechanical trouble shooting avenues you can think of with no luck?

Before you decide it’s the death of another printer it’s worth checking to see if it just needs an updated driver. As computers move ahead and their various parts evolve, they may become incompatible with older printer drivers.

Printer manufacturers do their best to alleviate this constant flux by coming out with updated printer drivers from time to time.

Personally, I tend to go to one of the huge driver resources on the web before going to the manufacturer’s website. There are several driver websites that have thousands of drivers from which to choose, such as http://www.driverguide.com.

I particularly like the Driver Guide website because they have a nice selection of harder to find drivers, as well as the availability of help from real people if you can’t fix your driver issue.

The http://www.driverguide.com/ site also has a handy wizard to help you figure out which driver you need.

You just click on the manufacturer name and it guides you from there, suggesting likely drivers along the way until you end at the specific driver for your printer or other device.

Installing printer drivers is typically pretty straight forward and many drivers come with installation utilities, but if you have trouble, check out a driver installation tutorial. This one (http://www.microsoft.com/whdc/system/pnppwr/pnp/no_reboot.mspx#EZG) from Microsoft covers several different types of driver installation and has several good tips.