Windows Vista™ Administrator's Pocket Consultant

Working with Device Drivers

For each hardware component installed on a computer, there is an associated device driver. The job of the device driver is to describe how the operating system uses the hardware abstraction layer (HAL) to work with a hardware component. The HAL handles the low-level communications tasks between the operating system and a hardware component. By installing a hardware component through the operating system, you are telling the operating system about the device driver it uses, and from then on, the device driver loads automatically and runs as part of the operating system.

Device Driver Essentials

Windows Vista includes an extensive library of device drivers. In the base installation of the operating system, these drivers ...