Robin Bignall wrote:
On Thu, 28 Jun 2012 17:14:45 -0400, Paul wrote:

Gene E. Bloch wrote:

It would be nice if they gave some reasons or some anecdotal evidence
for not using the program.

But anyway, I don't plan to use it :-)

For me, it's a matter of the "trust chain".

I trust a RealTek driver I get directly from the RealTek site.

I don't trust a driver that comes from the Driver Helper server.

While good AV software can catch things known to exist, nothing
would stop the owner of the Driver Helper site from inserting
their own custom malware.

So it's a matter of trust. Or expense, for the ones that
charge money for the privilege of (trying to) identify
your drivers for you.

In one of those driver programs, the menu offered after the
scan, had roughly twice as many drivers listed, as were actually
needed. So some of the programs "plump up the menu", to make
like they're doing you a big favor.

*******

On my WinXP machine, I don't even take the drivers off the Windows Update
menu, because 9 times out of 10, the version doesn't exist in the wild,
and there's something wrong with it. It's possible the ones offered
in Windows 7, aren't quite as obscure in terms of versioning.

I got a driver once from Microsoft (default ATI driver for my video
card, on the installer CD), that only operated one of the two display
channels on the card. If you played a 3D game, and alt-tabbed out,
all acceleration in the desktop was disabled. That's the kind of
thing Microsoft distributes. Well... tested... stuff...

I bought the commercial version. It downloads the drivers, they're
subjected to the usual virus check for anything downloaded, and you
CHOOSE whether to install them. Each driver has full details of where
it came from, version, date etc. and you can check back to the source to
verify veracity.

So when you look at the file name, do you see something similar offered
in the HDaudio section of the RealTek site ?

Motherboard audio solutions (at least for recent systems), are
either AC'97 (five years ago) or HDAudio (modern). The RealTek HDAudio
driver should be a "jumbo" driver, which handles most all of their
HDAudio sound chips.

Some chips in the past were PCI, and an enthusiast sound solution from
years ago, might have included a PCI chip soldered to the motherboard.
But for most of the rest, they're the simpler AC'97 or HDAudio, where there's
no intelligence to speak of, and the chip functions as an "audio pipe".
You send samples to the chip, and it has ADC and DACs for making analog
voltages to/from the samples.

The audio driver package, will usually have a huge .inf file. And that
file includes mappings from chip facilities, to the port wiring on
the motherboard. If a chip supports "three jack" and "six jack"
installations, the .inf file helps sort out and get the jack
assignments right.

Paul