Problems with Device Drivers on Macs and Windows

Most of us connect various peripherals to our computers, and most of the time we do so without any trouble.

With a Mac, it usually means just plugging in a USB or FireWire cable and waiting a second or two before your hardware is available.

With a PC, it's often the same - but it more often requires clicking your mouse a few times the first time a new device is connected while you point Windows to where your driver CD is or download it over the Internet.

Once that first configuration is over, however, both Macs and PCs tend to recognize their peripherals right away and behave about the same with them.

And then there are the problems.

Problem drivers are nothing new, and they're quite common on both Mac and Windows platforms. And don't even get me started on Linux, where many devices work well, but many others require an MS degree and a stack of manuals to configure, if they work at all.

Why?

Back to Macs and PCs - what goes wrong? And what can be done about it?

In a nutshell, there are four types of driver problems that are common to both platforms. First is a conflict, where the device is looking for a resource that is either in use or doesn't exist. Second, we have instability, where the device is recognized, but either a required OS component or (more often) the driver itself is so buggy as to occasionally crash. Third is a driver that, while working and stable, isn't well designed and thus performs poorly. Last is the rare instance where the available driver for your device isn't compatible with the OS version you want to use, a phenomenon that tends to flare up whenever Apple or Microsoft release a new OS version.

When a driver works poorly or not at all, you have a few choices. The best option is usually to return the device (if you can) and get a different one, hopefully with better drivers. If that's not an option, try looking for alternate drivers.

Bad Installers and Bad Drivers

I bought a high-end HP LaserJet printer for my office, and while the OS X, Windows XP, and Windows 2000 drivers were nice and fast, the Windows Server 2003 driver simply wouldn't install. The installer program would crash, and no alternative was available. In the end, I was able to expand the installer package and manually install the printer by pointing Windows printer wizard to the driver, but it should have been easier.

That same printer was problematic on my G4 Mac mini and Power Mac, giving slow output and often returning a buffer error, although it worked beautifully on the G5 iMac and MacBook (when I had it). After going through the ringer with both Apple and HP, we (HP and I) finally admitted that the driver was buggy on the G4 platform. The HP technician pointed me to a driver for an older printer - and sure enough, it worked like a champ, though without the ability to print two-sided, which we worked around by printing 2-sided jobs on another computer.

The point is that the driver on one platform, in this case G4 processor on OS X Tiger, had bugs, while Windows and non-G4s running Tiger were fine. This was a bad driver, as it would often fail to print and lock up the printer with an error.

Slow Drivers

Another example of a poor driver is for the Brother combination printer/fax/scanner/copier that I have at home. When I print to it from a Windows computer, the print job starts almost instantly, but from a Mac it takes about 40 seconds for the first page to start printing - and it pauses for about 40 seconds between each page. Clearly the driver forces the computer to think about something before sending the job to the printer, as once at the printer the page comes out just as quickly as it does on a PC.

...drivers often make a huge difference in performance and stability.

It doesn't matter what the device, the drivers often make a huge difference in performance and stability.

If you're a PC gamer, then no doubt you've spent time hunting for optimized or hacked drivers to unleash higher frame rates on a given game, with some gamers even taking the trouble to create different installations of Windows with different drivers, each optimized for a different game on their particular video card.

Drivers That Lose Features

One of the computers in my office has an older ATI Radeon 8500 card that effortlessly handles a pair of 19" LCDs, but there are quirks in various drivers for it. In Windows XP, we have it set up with an extended desktop, where the monitor on the right is a continuation of the monitor on the left. Everything works well, with options for the computer to think of both as one giant widescreen monitor or as two monitors side-by-side (the way a Mac works).

The "one monitor" mode is kind of cool, but in use it's rather annoying, as anything in the center is broken by the bezels of the two monitors, including the task bar at the bottom, the menu bar, and any windows that stretch across the break. Most annoying are the startup/logon dialog box and task switchers that always appear in the center.

Of course, working as two adjacent monitors you have a "Primary" monitor, where all dialog boxes and whatnot appear, and a "Secondary" that is just more workspace off to one side. In use, the adjacent mode is far better.

Strangely, while the options for both modes are present in both Windows XP and Windows 2000 (which I wanted to use), in Windows 2000 the adjacent mode doesn't work. This is very strange, as adjacent mode is far more common, is built into the operating system, and doesn't use any of the fancy ATI control panels. But with the control panel that's installed, it gets stuck in large monitor mode, while with the control panel removed it gets stuck in mirrored video mode (where both monitors display the same image). In XP everything works perfectly.

Fortunately, most of the time things just work, but if your computer is sluggish or unstable, before you blame Apple, Toshiba, or whoever made your computer, ask yourself if you've plugged in anything new recently. A new device driver or new application is, in my experience, often the cause of computer instability.