{"id":109903,"date":"2020-01-22T15:15:33","date_gmt":"2020-01-22T07:15:33","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.drivereasy.com\/?page_id=109903"},"modified":"2025-07-08T18:59:25","modified_gmt":"2025-07-08T10:59:25","slug":"device-manager","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/www.drivereasy.com\/device-manager\/","title":{"rendered":"Device manager"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
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How to use Device Manager to update your drivers in Windows 11, 10 & 7\n <\/h1>\n

Device Manager is a Windows utility that allows you to update and reinstall drivers for individual devices (e.g. your video card, sound card or network card) for free. Most people use it the first time they try to update a driver.<\/p>\n

Unfortunately, it\u2019s a very tedious way of identifying which devices have outdated drivers, because it doesn\u2019t flag them. To find out if a driver is out of date, you have to actually try to update it. If Windows thinks the driver is out of date, it will update it for you; if not, it will tell you you already have the latest driver. Obviously doing that for every single device takes a long time. <\/p>\n

And to make matters worse, Device Manager often won\u2019t give you the latest driver anyway<\/b>. That\u2019s because it categorizes driver updates as either \u2018critical\u2019, \u2018automatic\u2019 or \u2018optional\u2019, and it doesn\u2019t usually concern itself with the \u2018optional\u2019 ones. So long as you have the updates it calls \u2018critical\u2019 and \u2018automatic\u2019, it\u2019s happy. It won\u2019t, for example, install a new \u2018optional\u2019 update, if it already has an old \u2018critical\u2019 update installed.<\/p>\n <\/div>\n <\/div>\n <\/div>\n <\/div>\n\n\n\n

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Jump ahead to the section you\u2019re interested in<\/b><\/p>\n