What are drivers and how do they affect my network performance?
A driver is the software that tells your computer how to interact with a piece of hardware. In this case the hardware is your ethernet card. We have found that PC performance on the network can be improved by updating these drivers on some network cards. We have updated drivers for the SMC 1211 card. To find out what card you have, you can look in your ‘control panel’ in the ‘network’ folder and read your card from the information listed. Another good way is to use Belarc Advisor (found on the Third Party Tools page), and look in the ‘communications’ section. If you have one of the cards mentioned above, then you may download and install the appropriate driver from ftp://ftp.uwindsor.ca/pub/people/philip-f/drivers. Those with the SMC 1211 card should download the file ‘1211.exe’. If you don’t feel comfortable updating your drivers then feel free to call the helpdesk for assistance.
