Slow Performance? No Performance?

When attempting to connect external devices to your personal computer, these devices may sometimes wrongfully bear the blame when the connection doesn’t work out. Use this little-known tip to see whether your Windows machine is the culprit.

I recently bought laptop and I’ve been really pleased with its performance. It offers a reasonably small, basic, no-frills platform with a quick startup and a powerful processor that can run my resource-intensive Dragon Naturally Speaking voice dictation software faster than ever.

These few weeks into using this new machine, I ran into a snag when trying to attach a Bluetooth device. After consulting my PC’s onboard and the web-based help, I had no luck in getting the device to connect. I tried restarting my machine, restarting my device, and searching the web for an installer for the device. After installing and reinstalling that, still no go – I was pretty fed up.

Just as I was about to take the device back to the store for a refund, I remembered a little-known trick that had sometimes helped me in the past: a hardware driver update.

In this case, the hardware in question wasn’t the device hardware, but the Bluetooth hardware residing on my laptop. When I ran a driver update in Windows, I saw that the system was indeed downloading new Bluetooth software for my laptop. After the update wizard said the update was complete, I restarted my laptop. My troublesome device then connected.

Read on to see how to do an update…

How to Do a Hardware Driver Update

While these instructions are specific to Windows 7, you can also use it for other versions of Windows by going to the equivalent screens in your OS.

Make certain your computer is connected to the internet.

1. From your desktop, place the cursor over the My Computer icon.
2. Use your mouse to do a right-button click. A drop-down option menu appears.
3. Select Properties. A System window appears.
4. Click Device Manager. A Device Manager window opens showing the list of devices.
5. Click the "+" adjacent to the object (see the red arrow on the left below) for the hardware you wish to update.
6. The hardware item expands and the "+" changes to a "-". In the case of my machine's Bluetooth hardware setup, there are two items I will attempt to update. I will update one of my Bluetooth devices (right red arrow above).
7. Place the cursor over the device object and do a right-click. A drop-down option menu appears.
8. Select Update Driver Software. An Update Driver Software window appears.
9. Select Search automatically for updated driver software. A search window appears and shows some movement while the system searches for an updated driver.
10. After a few moments, you may be given a message saying that you have the most updated driver already.
11. If a new update is available for your driver, a different window appears showing that your driver is being downloaded and updated. After a few moments, you see a encouraging window stating that the new driver has successfully updated.

While it's not absolutely necessary to restart your PC after making the update, it's generally a good idea to do a restart anyway. This locks in your new driver's settings.