How to Upgrade a Video Card Driver

After upgrading your operating system, you must upgrade your video card driver as well. This is very important. However, before you go on, make sure you have enabled system restore on your computer. This is a precautionary measure just in case anything goes wrong as you can always go back to a last known good configuration.

1. To upgrade the graphics or video card driver, click on the Start button. On the Start menu, click on Computer.

2. Inside the computer window, right-click on an empty space, follow the drop down menu and click on Properties.

3. The above step should take you to a dialog box. Look and click on the 'Device Manager' link.

If prompted, sign in as the system administrator.

4. On the device manager dialog box, look for Display Adapters. Click on the plus sign and take note of the name of your graphics card.

5. Go to the manufacturer’s Web site. In my case, the video card of my Dell laptop was manufactured by NVIDIA, therefore, I'm going to download the driver from the NVIDIA website.

6. I then visited the US/Canada NVIDIA web site and clicked on Download Driver. Next, I looked for the video card driver specific to my hardware. You can automatically detect the video card driver or you can find it manually.

7. Follow all instructions and save the file to your Desktop.

8. Now, go back to your Device Manager. Again, locate the Display Adapters; click on the plus sign and right-click on the graphics card. Select uninstall to remove the old driver.

9. Go back to the downloaded file on your Desktop and double click on it. Follow the instructions given by the installation wizard.

10. Wait for the installation to complete and restart your computer.

You are required to update your video card driver after installing a fresh copy of Windows operating system or Mac OS. There are many reasons why one may decide to install a fresh copy of an operating system. Whatever the reason is, check to see that your video card driver doesn’t need an upgrade. However, if you upgraded your operating system, there is a huge chance that you pretty much need to upgrade the video card driver as well.

Also, if you change out or upgrade your video card, you will probably need to update the driver as well.

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-By Dominic

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