Inquiry more than a problem…  

Should I be concerned that after nearly a year of ownership of my AS5738PG-6306 Notebook that Acer has NOT released a single Driver update during this time? All of the drivers on my system are dated between 2006 on through to 2009 only, no 2010 at all anywhere. I know that this is IMPOSSIBLE because drivers are updated at least once every year (barring the HDD/USB mumbo jumbo), sometimes on up to three but it’s never a case of never!

I happen to know that ATI has in fact released a new driver for the ATI Mobility Radeon HD 4570 circa 2010. Yet, this driver version isn’t registering in Device Manager’s “Update online” thing, nor on “Acer Updater” or “Winnows Update” and this goes for all other possibly newer versions available out there.

So my question is… what would happen if I used Drivers NOT approved by Acer on this Notebook, directly from the device’s manufacturer instead? I am concerned this could interfere with certain “OEM” programming/configurations from Acer if I chose to do this.

If there is ANY chance that this could mess my system up (necessitating a Factory Restore) I do NOT wish to do this. I have NEVER used Drivers not sent out to my system by the system’s Manufacturer before so I am just curious as to what I should do in this instance.

From the looks of it, Acer will NEVER send out these updates for my (now discontinued) system.

Also, my Intel Core 2 Duo T6600 states “2006” for its driver version… that explains a hell of a lot on all of the questionable readings TskMn gives out for this CPU – sometimes hits 100% load on simple webpages! I want to update it too. No WAY Intel never released an updated driver newer than 2006 for that CPU!

As for the million dollar question... this PC isn't broke, it's actually running very good. So, is this a case of "if it ain't broke, don't fix it" or should I take the chance and just go for possible performance boosts any/all updated drivers out there for my system's hardware have to offer?


As always, thank you very much for your help!

Thanks for that. I tried applying the latest GPU Driver (ATI's 10.11) and I tried updating my WEI... it returned an error citing that it "couldn't check video playback quality" and then closed. Needless to say, I restored it back.

I did discover that my WLAN card needed an update through Intel's little automatic update wizard thing, so that's 1 out of potential dozens at least lol. I think I'm going to stop there however. It's not broke, so I'm going to try and not fix it - effectively actually breaking it.

But until functionality/performance takes a hit, I'm letting it alone.