I am curious as to how many of you install third party drivers such as motherboard, graphics card and others or just leave that up to Windows.
For now, I just let Windows do its thing on my desktop and my laptop (after a clean install on both) but I'll be looking at a few key drivers tomorrow after I let these new installations bake a bit. BTW, it found working drivers for everything except my USB Card Reader (laptop) so I had to do a manual install for that one.
I make sure that I do a comparison of both. MS does not always have the latest drivers especially for the latest hardware software interfaces.
I always install the latest drives, wherever they come from.
Calling them third party drivers sound terrible. There are third party drivers, made by people for outdated products or just to customize them, not officially. Normal are made by the manufacturer and MS can not really test all the drivers all the time, so it grabs only some of them time to time. There have been many cases, where new drivers brought new features or fixed issues, that is the point of creating them actually, they are not created just because someone gets bored.
I let Windows do it for now... depending on my PC's requirements.
I mostly let Win10 take care of the drivers when Upgrading over Win7 w/SP1 or Win8.1 but did have to get Bluetooth drivers for a Dell Notebook, fortunately Dell already had them.
I try to make sure I have the latest drivers from the manufacture...sometimes there better than the ones Microsoft provides(sometimes not always). But at least it is a good starting point when something does go wrong.
"Third party" drivers associate of drivers made by other parties than manufacturer. Drivers that windows installs are made by parts manufacturers and only distributed by MS. Ones that passed MS testing are labeled WHQL
What is Windows Hardware Quality Labs (WHQL)? - Definition from WhatIs.com
I always try to go to the manufacturer, one slightly complex item is motherboard drivers - I obviously prefer the drivers from the motherboard manufacturer as these will, (or should be), tested with and fine tuned to work with all the other components on the motherboard but have in the past gone to the actual component manufacturers to solve specific issues.
Also you see a lot of posts, blogs, Etc, that Microsoft updates have broken my printer or the like, Microsoft have no obligation to retain backwards compatibility it's up to the equipment manufacturers to update their drivers, the information for changes are made available by Microsoft, but some manufacturers even choose not to update drivers in an attempt to drive sales of new compatible equipment
I allow Microsoft to install it's third party drivers at installation time, but try to replace them with the manufacturers originals as soon as possible
