Have you ever had your computer say that it was looking for drivers? Drivers are basically software files that tell Windows how to communicate and run with a particular piece of hardware. Lets say you plugin a game controller, new digital camera, or a webcam. The computer will look for a driver but if it cannot find it you are supposed to supply Windows with a directory to the file.

Follow up:

How to install computer hardware

If you bought your hardware brand new it should come with a Drivers CD. This CD contains the drivers for that particular piece of hardware. If you do have a computer part that does did not come with a Drivers CD then you can still use it by downloading the drivers from the website of the manufacturer. Lets say you have an HP printer. You hook it up all correctly but it did not come with a CD. If you go to HP's website and click on the support tab then on drivers there are various versions of Printers that you can select to download the drivers.

I think that drivers are called drivers because they "drive the hardware" much like a driver in a car. Lets say that you do not know the manufacturer's web address. You can still search Google for the driver with the model number. To do this you can search for something like this "HP Deskjet 3030 driver" and you can download the driver for that device.

Windows Device Manager

Windows allows you to see all of the hardware components that are connected to your PC. To see this you can click Start then right click My Computer/Computer and then click properties. Now click on Device Manager.

If you see any yellow question marks anywhere then this means that the hardware is lacking a driver or there is a problem with it. Most of the time it means that a driver is missing. To fix this you can right click the device and update/install the driver from the folder that contains it.

Now you know the ghost in the machine. The piece of software that governs the hardware. Now you know how to install computer hardware.