Most major PC vendors have excellent self-service
technical support Web sites, where you can enter a PC serial number
or model number and get a complete list of all included hardware
components, as well as updated documentation, firmware revisions and
device drivers.
These online resources, generally available for
desktop PCs, notebooks and servers, are critical time-saving
tools when troubleshooting or upgrading a PC. Without these
resources, or if the vendor has gone out of business, tracking down
required device drivers and documentation can be anywhere from
difficult to a near impossible scavenger hunt.
Avoiding Device Driver Scavenger Hunts with Custom PC's
For various computer support tasks, you often
need to find hardware device drivers for video cards, network cards,
modems, sound cards, host adapters, CD-RW drives and tape drives.
The board-of-the-month club approach, epitomized by much of the
“white-box” PC industry, is great for your local computer
consultant’s profit margin and job security, but it can be
extremely detrimental to your computer support costs in the long
run.
If you’ve never been intimately involved in
this kind of frustrating PC hardware work, consider yourself
fortunate. But also recognize that these tasks can be painfully
time-consuming, if you don’t have PC hardware consistency and
appropriate vendor resources at your disposal.
Custom PC's Action Items
Does your company purchase mainly
"white-box" or brand-name systems, or a combination of the
two?
If you have a substantial amount of
"white-box" systems, how do you go about locating updated
device drivers and firmware updates when needed?
For brand-name systems, are you aware of
how to access various self-help online resources, which provide
simplified access to various software downloads such as updated
device drivers and firmware revisions?
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