What Is a USB Driver?

Video Transcript

"Hi, my name is Dave Andrews and today I'm going to show you what is a USB driver. Now I have here a little USB external hard drive device. It basically takes a compact flash or it takes different types of SD cards that you would use in your camera or any other device like that. But what I'm interested here with this device is not the device itself but rather its connection. This device uses a little USB connection which is sort of a square boxy type of connector right here. And just about every modern computer in late years or recent years uses these USB connections for their external devices. I'm going to take this and plug it in and then I'm going to show you what actually runs the device which is called a driver. Just going to plug that in there. Now if you could see my screen, Windows is going to recognize that a new USB device has just been plugged in. And it's going to ask me what I would like to do with it. Basically that is the result of this USB drive, driver rather that's running the programming behind this device. I'm going to show you where that is. I'm going to close this out. I'm going to go to my start menu, I'm going to right click on computer or my computer and I'm going to go to manage. I'll basically have to be an admen so let's click continue. Screen may take a second to come up but here you have it. This is the computer management screen. Let's go to the device manager. Now this is a list of all the drivers that are installed on your computer. You scroll down here to universal serial bus controllers. These are your USB drivers. Now you can do a lot of things from here. You can right click on and you can actually uninstall them, I wouldn't suggest you do that. But you can do properties for each item. You can tell the version and basically the host that controls it. These drivers are the programs that control the USB on your computer and that is what a USB driver is. My name is Dave Andrews and I've just told you what a USB driver is."