Checking drivers

[Aardvarkly]

I have recently been trying to sort out my wife's W7 laptop. It has been quite slow although it is only used for internet and a bit of data storage. Nothing really challenging. I spent last evening updating various bits of software and scanning for malware. Malwarebytes found four items and dealt with them. I still feel there is room for improvement. The Simplix Update Pack (only 820mb) download took nearly an hour to download even though we are blessed with an incredible 10meg internet speed at the moment. The actual rate of downloading the file was less than 25kb toward the end.

I am thinking maybe I need to look at drivers. ?? At first I thought to try Driver Booster. I have used it in the past when doing the last install on my desktop. While searching for it online I ran across quite a few negative posts about it being everything from buggy and ineffective to genuinely harmful. I thought perhaps it was time to ask here at the forum. Is there a way to know if I have a driver problem, how to identify it, and where to go for an update that will work on a W7 machine?

The laptop in question is an Asus K53E, Celeron B820 1.7ghz, RAM 6gb, Windows 7 64bit

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Judging by the lack of responses, perhaps someone can tell me how they find out that drivers are the cause of a problem if they don't use these driver updaters. And then how they know where to find an update.

 

[Alejandro85]

Normally I wouldn't consider the driver a likely cause for such slow speeds, there are many factors that influence speeds like your ISP, server loads, access restrictions and the like. Pointing at the driver feels unlikely to yield mcuh results to me, unless you're geting BSODs and those point to some specific driver.

A simple test is to run a speedtest to check network speed (Speedtest by Ookla - The Global Broadband Speed Test for example). Does that gives a result close to what your ISP claims? If not, can you try it on some other network (say using your phone as an acess point or on a public wifi).

Driver updater software generally creates more problems than it solves. If you want to update your drivers, check their official website for the newest version, specially if you've identified a particular one as problematic.

 

[Aardvarkly]

I thank you for your post. I take on board your opinion that drivers may not affect download speed. Although during the painfully long download of the Simplix Update I checked the speed (on my desktop PC) with Ookla and found it to be just over 10 meg at the time. I can't imagine why the internet was giving me that speed at the same time the laptop was only getting way less than one meg.

 

[torchwood]

Drivers DO control the download speeds.......
Especially if iits dual channell (like my W7 Intel 5100)
view the advanced option section for the driver settings
by the way what is the driver


see this article
Just a moment...

 

[Aardvarkly]

Will try to get back to you. Internet is down, as happens quite often here, and no way to connect to internet. Even via mobile phone network. No coverage here.