The Achilles’ Heel of Your Computer
Computers often need to be connected to printers, cameras, and USB flash drives and other hardware, but the small pieces of software that enable communications with these peripherals, known as “device drivers,” have a bad reputation. Experts believe that device driver failures are responsible for about 85 percent of crashes on Windows machines, and poorly written device drivers can also introduce security holes on an otherwise protected computer. Part of the problem is that a device driver can’t easily be examined by anyone outside the company that created it.
