How do I know a crash is caused by a driver? Luckily the situation has improved so there are likely much less crashes in Windows, but overall drivers are still the main culprit. Remember how everyone hated Windows Vista because it crashed all the time? Turns out, it wasn’t really the fault of the OS: Now, drivers are just pieces of software coded by human beings - and with all things human, there’s definitely the chances of something not working or one driver not working well with another. The same goes for sound drivers, graphics drivers, Blu-ray drivers, and even drivers for the “mainboard” your processor sits on.

It directly interfaces with Windows and plugs deep into the “kernel” (think of it as the heart of Windows). They need to, obviously: Your Wi-Fi driver needs to control the way your Wi-Fi adapter works….when it connects to a network, when to go into standby, and which wi-fi standard to use.

In this article we’ll explain why that’s the case and why keeping drivers up-to-date might help reduce or eliminate some of these crashes altogether.ĭrivers have super low-level access to your entire PCs hardware and Windows itself.

According to Microsoft's research, about 70-75% of all “STOP” errors (those are the dreaded blue screen of deaths) come from drivers:ħ0 percent are caused by third-party driver codeĥ percent are caused by Microsoft code (also MS only drivers)ġ5 percent have unknown causes (because the memory is too corrupted to analyze) When you get a bluescreen in Windows, your Zoom call crashes, or Fortnite shows a black screen, who do you blame? Yes: Microsoft, Zoom, and Epic Games. Any PC user should check for new graphic drivers once a month to boost speed and get more features for free.

How to fix display driver keep crashing