Why new laptops ship with old drivers?

[fastcat]

I bought a new laptop recently, and AMD Ryzen. I installed a drivers utility to check that everything was up to date and it detected quite a few drivers out of date, display, CPU, etc, one of them marked as being from 2017, when the laptop had not been built yet.

 

Why would a manufacturer ship a new laptop with old drivers? I am asking this because perhaps there is a reason for me not to update to the latest drivers or I am just wondering if the software I am using to update the drivers, a free utility that I found in DuckDuckGo, might be giving me the wrong dates about the old drivers. 

[Ve7878]

I wouldn't mess around with this if everything was working properly. There could be a number of reasons why the drivers are older. The newer versions which the utility is pulling down may be generic drivers whereas the manufacturer has customised drivers specific to their hardware. It could also just be an error on the driver checkers part.

 

It's also possible that your laptop had the Microsoft drivers for some hardware and the driver update utility has pulled in newer ones from the manufacturer. This isn't always necessary.

 

Do you have an example of a driver which was updated?

[Skiver Veteran]

How old is old?

 

That laptop could have been sat on a shelf in a warehouse for months whilst new drivers were released so I wouldn't ever expect any piece of hardware to come out of the box fully up to date.

 

I personally would recommend going direct to the manufacturer to get drivers - if it's an AMD CPU then go to AMD for the drivers.

[fastcat]

28 minutes ago, Vince800 said:

Do you have an example of a driver which was updated?

I remembered something that is probably important, the laptop came without Windows installed.

 

I installed  the official Windows 10 image that I downloaded from the official Microsoft website and I bought the registration number for Windows 10 Pro from a reseller in ebay for 5 Euros, activated without problems.

 

Perhaps it is a Windows problem and it does not have to do with the manufacturer.

 

I do not remember the specifics of the drivers what were updated, it was eight and one of them was the graphics card chipset and the other one for the network card.

Edited March 6, 2020 by fastcat

[adrynalyne]

Driver utilities are the worst thing ever. They look for any file that has an older date without knowing what or why. 
 

Did you actually visually inspect these drivers in device manager to confirm it? Who was the provider? The devices? 
 

Not all files get updated regularly because they are at stable, working versions. Driver utilities don’t care who the source of the newer file is, they will run with it. Even if it’s not designed or known to work with your machine. 

[Ve7878]

2 hours ago, fastcat said:

I remembered something that is probably important, the laptop came without Windows installed.

 

I installed  the official Windows 10 image that I downloaded from the official Microsoft website and I bought the registration number for Windows 10 Pro from a reseller in ebay for 5 Euros, activated without problems.

 

Perhaps it is a Windows problem and it does not have to do with the manufacturer.

 

I do not remember the specifics of the drivers what were updated, it was eight and one of them was the graphics card chipset and the other one for the network card.

No perhaps it's a problem with the driver utility you used.

 

It's best to follow the advice from @adrynalyne above and check in device manager in future instead of using questionable update tools.

[Brandon H Supervisor]

There's a couple reasons a new laptop could have older drivers. OEMs don't update their base image that they flash too frequently. The laptops/towers also sit in a warehouse longer than you'd think as well.

 

Some drivers update rather frequently so it's not hard to think how a machine sitting in a warehouse or on the shelf unused would quickly have drivers go out of date.

 

Most of the time there's no issue with this as most of the updates are minor or fix very specific things.

 

I agree for the most part with the rest of the people in this thread as well; most driver utilities suck and don't do their job properly. There's ONE utility I've found that actually does things right for driver scans and updates, and that's IObit Driver Booster. No need to pay for the PRO version, the basic version scans critical drivers and shows which ones have new versions and allows you to install them 1 by 1. I have not had any issue using this on my laptop since I got it a few months ago. The same can't be said for other driver scanners.

[shockz]

Don’t fix what isn’t broke. I rarely go searching for newer drivers or bios versions unless I’m having a specific issue. 
 

Most of the time I wipe a factory imaged laptop and install my own instance of windows. Windows update usually does a pretty good job at installing any missing drivers. If there is one that it can’t find, then I go to oem website. 
 

Updating drivers for the sake of updating is just silly to me.  

[Brandon H Supervisor]

1 minute ago, shockz said:

Updating drivers for the sake of updating is just silly to me.  

With the exception of graphics drivers I would say for gaming  

[fastcat]

OK, good advice here, thank you.

 

I had used Iobit Drive Booster free version like Brandon said, they are a Chinese company which did not inspire me too much trust but their software is one of the most downloaded in Majorgeeks.

Edited March 7, 2020 by fastcat

[cork1958]

21 hours ago, shockz said:

Don’t fix what isn’t broke. I rarely go searching for newer drivers or bios versions unless I’m having a specific issue. 
 

Most of the time I wipe a factory imaged laptop and install my own instance of windows. Windows update usually does a pretty good job at installing any missing drivers. If there is one that it can’t find, then I go to oem website. 
 

Updating drivers for the sake of updating is just silly to me.  

Couldn't agree with that more! As Brandon says though, updating graphic drivers may be important for gamers, which I'm not, but those drivers are the ONLY one's I've ever had screw up a machine, so I rarely purposely go looking for those either.

[Jim K Global Moderator]

If you had done a clean install of Windows ... I would have just gone to the notebook manufactures website (like Dell) and grab the latest drivers.  I avoid 3rd party driver update utilities.  With that said, drivers or BIOS updates don't scare me ... I keep my crap up to date.

[Guest]

26 minutes ago, Jim K said:

If you had done a clean install of Windows ... I would have just gone to the notebook manufactures website (like Dell) and grab the latest drivers.  I avoid 3rd party driver update utilities.  With that said, drivers or BIOS updates don't scare me ... I keep my crap up to date.

gone are the days of doing a bios update from floppy disks!

[Jim K Global Moderator]

Just now, TrekRich said:

gone are the days of doing a bios update from floppy disks!

Yep.  Also seems less risky these days...though I've never "bricked" a system even in the floppy-BIOS days.

[Guest]

Just now, Jim K said:

Yep.  Also seems less risky these days...though I've never "bricked" a system even in the floppy-BIOS days.

i never did, always had to make sure you did a full format of the floppy first. none of that quick format rubbish!

[Ve7878]

1 minute ago, TrekRich said:

i never did, always had to make sure you did a full format of the floppy first. none of that quick format rubbish!

No me neither. Even when I took a risk once of replacing a Packard Bell BIOS back in the late 90s with the generic Gigabyte one (the board was a Gigabyte) to unlock some features PB had restricted. That being said, I advise to never do this.

[goretsky Supervisor]

Hello,

 

Generally speaking, laptops are going to ship with whatever the manufacturer has determined to be compatible, working software on them (device drivers, manufacturer and machine-specific software, etc.).  If the manufacturer provides some sort of system-specific update software (I know Dell, Hewlett-Packard and Lenovo do, and probably others as well), then running that to get the latest drivers and software should work.  You can also try using Windows Update to download drivers, or visiting the silicon vendor's support site (AMD, Intel, Nvidia, Realtek, etc.) to see what sort of device drivers they offer.  One thing to keep in mind is that drivers from the latter tend not to update (or even disable) and manufacturer-specific customizations.

 

Regards,

Aryeh Goretsky