Windows 8.1: The Missing Manual

Chapter 20. Hardware & Drivers

If your Windows 8.1 machine is a tablet, good for you. You probably won’t have to spend much time mucking around with peripherals and their drivers. But if you have a regular PC, adding new gear is part of the fun. Hard drives, flash drives, cameras, phones, printers, scanners, network cards, video cards, keyboards, monitors, game controllers, and other accessories all make life worth living. When you introduce a new piece of equipment to the PC, you must hook it up and install its driver, the software that lets a new gadget talk to the rest of the PC.

UP TO SPEED: The Master Compatibility List

Windows 8 was another leap ahead in the evolution of the operating system. Discovering that a piece of your existing equipment is now flaky or nonfunctional is par for the course.

If you’d like to eliminate every glitch and every shred of troubleshooting inconvenience, then limit your add-on gear to products that pass the test—the one administered by the Windows 8.1 Upgrade Assistant. That’s a little program you can download from this Web site:

http://windows.microsoft.com/en-US/windows-8/upgrade-to-windows-8

Even if your computer uses Windows Vista—which means it’s probably fine for Windows 8—running the Upgrade Assistant is a good idea. You should know how many of your peripherals won’t work before you install Windows 8. (The Upgrade Assistant takes the place of the old Hardware Compatibility List [HCL], an online list of every gadget and program on earth that ...