For your sound card to work optimally and continue to work, you have to stay on top of your sound card driver updates. You may not realize it, but many sound card manufacturers update their drivers on a monthly basis. With Windows constantly updating, you need to keep on top of it or you can find yourself looking at sound driver issues.

What is a Sound Driver?

A sound driver is a little piece of programming that allows your sound card to talk to Windows. It acts as a translator. So when a program wants to play sound or music, it will. Without the driver, you would have silence, static, or a buzzing sound. Definitely not the sound effects you want when using your computer for Skype, iTunes, or playing games.

How to Manually Update Your Sound Card Driver

The first step in updating your sound card driver is knowing what sound card you have. To do that, you need to go into Device Manager and find your sound card. So follow these steps:

1. Click on Start
2. Go to the Search Bar
3. Type in “Device Manager” and press Enter
4. Go into the Device Manager
5. Go to “Sound, video and game controllers.” You should see your sound card listed there.
6. Write down the make and model of your sound card

Now the next step is to go to the manufacturer’s web page and find the latest drivers. Most manufacturers’ web pages are easy to navigate.

• First do a Google search for the manufacturer’s page.
• Then when you get to the page, look for “Support” or “Downloads.”
• There will either be a search feature or a feature where you enter your model information into drop down boxes to narrow the search for the drivers. Since you should have your model numbers written down, this will be easy.
• Then the website will want to know which version of Windows you have—again an easy question.
• Now you can download the file to a place you will remember. Try to make a mental note on if the file is an exe or not.

Now that you have the file, things can be easy—or they could be complicated. It all depends on if the file was an exe or not. If the file was an exe, all you have to do is double click it and it will self install. We’re going to assume that it was not an exe, for the benefit of our readers who are not so lucky. To update sound card drivers follow these steps:

1. Go back into Device Manager
2. Double click on the sound card
3. Click on the “Driver” tab
4. Click on the “Update Driver” button
5. Browse to where you saved the driver from the manufacturer’s website
6. Update Driver
7. Your computer may want to restart at this time. Let it.

Install Your Drivers the Easy Way

What if we told you there was a way to stay on top of the updated drivers as they came out without having to go to the manufacturer’s web page every month, and hassle with the Device Manager and updating drivers? What if we told you it only took a couple clicks of the mouse to do it? Wouldn’t you want to do it this way instead?

That’s what driver update software is all about. Keeping up with the latest drivers, while saving you the time and effort of hunting down the latest sound card drivers and the hassle of updating them.

If you have an ATI Radeon video card and are experiencing black screens when trying to watch videos or play games, you have a problem with your ATI Radeon drivers. This is a common problem that is easily fixed just by updating your ATI Radeon drivers.

ATI Radeon 101

When you buy an ATI Radeon, you are purchasing the results of millions of dollars in research and development. The ATI Radeon is at the top level of performance in video cards so it is much sought-after by gamers. The only company that makes anything that compares is NVIDIA with their GeForce video cards. ATI Radeon seems to be more widespread in laptops and pre-built computers than NVIDIA GeForce cards.

How to Manually Update Your ATI Radeon Drivers

The first step in updating your drivers is knowing which drivers you need. To pursue this end, follow these steps:

1. Go to Start
2. In the Search Bar type in “Device Manager” and press Enter
3. Go to your Device Manager
4. Under “Sound, video, and game controllers” find your ATI Radeon video card and make note of the model

The next step in updating the driver is to download the most recent driver from AMD’s website. Follow these steps:

1. Go to http://support.amd.com/us/gpudownload/Pages/index.aspx
2. Select the appropriate value from the first dropdown box. Do you have a laptop? (That would be a notebook.)  A desktop is what most people think of when they think of a computer.
3. Continue filling in the boxes with the model information for your ATI Radeon video card and your version of Windows
4. Press the Display results button
5. This will take you to the latest drivers available for your hardware. For many ATI Radeon cards, this consists of the Catalyst Suite. We suggest you keep it up to date as it is comprised of several drivers. Download the file to a place where you will be able to find it and get to it easily.

Okay, now you’ve got the drivers from the website. What’s the next step? Simple enough. Go to where you saved the file and double click on it. It is an exe file so it is going to install itself where it needs to go.

The Easy Way to Install Drivers

The manual way to update ATI Radeon drivers is the hard way to update your video drivers. Now that we’ve walked you through it, let’s try the easy way. Driver update software.

Programmers noticed that average people were having a lot of issues with driver errors, so they made a program to update corrupt or out of date drivers automatically without making the person go through Device Manager to find the device, go to the manufacturer’s web page for the latest drivers, and go back to Device Manager to install the drivers. Instead driver update software will install ATI Radeon drivers for you with a few clicks of the mouse.

With the Acer Aspire you have a wide array of hardware and thus drivers, so when you have out of date drivers finding Acer Aspire drivers can be easy or daunting depending on how many drivers are out of date.

Know Your Computer Hardware

First you need to know exactly what hardware you have since there are several models of Aspire laptops out there. To do that you need to go into Device Manager using the Search bar in the Start menu and find your hardware there.

Where to Find Your Drivers

The best place to find your Acer Aspire drivers is the manufacturer’s web page. So follow these steps:

1. Go to support.acer.com
2. Click Notebook
3. Click Aspire
4. Click on your model
5. Find the driver you need and download it to a place you will remember the location. Make a note on if the file is an exe file.

Update Acer Aspire Drivers

Once you have downloaded the drivers if the file is an exe file, all you need to do is double click the file and it will self install. If it’s not an exe file, then you need to go back into Device Manager and follow these steps:

1. Double click on the device
2. Go to the “Driver” tab
3. Click on “Update driver” button
4. “Browse” to the location you saved the driver and update from there
5. Your computer may want to restart now

A Simpler Way to Update Drivers

There is an easier way. Using driver update software, you can scan your computer for the devices with out of date drivers, scan the Internet for the latest drivers, and then install the latest Acer Aspire drivers with just a couple clicks of your mouse. Hassle free driver updating. No more going into Device Manager for you.