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Home > Archive > General Discussion > February 2002 > Word of Caution
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| Shrink 2002-02-25, 9:28 am |
| Just a word of caution to network administrators with limited experience (like me). I do routine preventative maintanence on all of the computers in our network, which involves disk cleanup, scandisk, and defrag every 2 to 3 weeks. I also go to windowsupdate and get the latest patches, fixes, etc. Occasaionally, windowsupdate also offers updated drivers for various components on your PC. This is where my caution comes in. I have always run the updates on the drivers, but I recently installed updated drivers for the primary and secondary hard disk controllers, and found that I had eliminated the functioning of the CD Rom drive on all the computers! The updated drivers were apparently incompatible with the motherboard and it took me quite a period of time to reinstall the old drivers and get the CD Rom drives back. I had also installed updated video drivers on my home computer that were being offered as the latest drivers from Nvidia for their g-force vid card. These drivers caused the computer to freeze up about 2 minutes after booting up.
I will be much more careful in the future....and just want to caution others out there that updating drivers is not always a good idea. | |
| The VMS Kid 2002-02-25, 9:47 am |
| Thanks for the advice. My Windows machine recently lost its ability to see my CD-ROM drive, and I was wondering if I had done any updates that may have affected it somehow. | |
| cross36 2002-02-25, 9:54 am |
| Ditto thanks for the input Shrink.. | |
| jombeewoof 2002-02-25, 11:33 am |
| it's always a good idea to have a "test" machine to try new drivers out on and if in a large network environment a small test network (2-5 hosts) to test all upgrades on so if something like this does happen it won't affect your real, "production network"
some good advice i read in a book somewhere | |
| MistyRing 2002-02-25, 11:37 am |
| There is a school of thought that says "if it ain't broke don't fix it". I don't subscribe to it myself but..... | |
| Pavlov 2002-02-25, 1:06 pm |
| when it comes to the specific drivers - I am a firm believer in "if it ain't broke don't fix it". Especially in a large network! No need to bring more headaches than the users create daily  | |
| PotatoHead 2002-02-25, 2:44 pm |
| Thanks for the advice, I, like you, use Windows Update regularly but I never update drivers. |
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