I now work in a computer repair shop, and just in the last week I've seen at least a dozen computers brought in because they "don't work", just because they're running outdated drivers.
Now I can hardly complain about making 50 bucks for 10 minutes of "labor", but great companies like nVidia and SOYO do have a good reason to gripe. They get calls every day from people who can't figure out why their cards or motherboards aren't working correctly.
Drivers certainly won't fix everything, but please check a companys website to make sure you have the most recent update for your product. Taking a few minutes to update your drivers could save you quite a bit of time and money, and even if nothing seems to be wrong, an updated driver can improve performance, especially in graphics cards.

LOL too true...too true.

I have a friend that works in a local pc shop who tells people they need a new hard drive or a new processor, then updates the driver, and sell the "bad" part on ebay. hell he gave me a perfectly good 40 gig WD 7200 rpm drive a couple of weeks ago because he had too many to sell (or was bein nice, either way)

he's ripping off his customers, does the better business bureau know about this, John Stossel on nightline (or is it 20/20) would love to get his hands on this one.

what a racket. "Bad" computer parts being practically stollen. thats horrible!

I used to do house calls when I ran a repair business. It cost $60 just for me to show up and $40 an hour. I would usually have the PC up and running in about 5 minutes and would feel so guilty about taking the money I would spend the next 55 minutes giving PC usage classes.

heh wut ppl would do for money....dont u just hate that ripping off fealing for the first few minutes or so

SilentNitro...

Yer lucky...

In my little corner of the world, all I see is friggin' ANCIENT stuff. not a lot of video issues or easy stuff like that. I get the hard crap like virus problems (or in the case of Mcafee and Windows 98 1st edition, Anti-virus problems), and as we're labeled "Data Savers", we have to recover as much as we can off a person's drive when somethin' crashes.

Also a lot of Win 9X/ME issues, network performance problems and trying to find drivers for old modems and network cards.

Hell, I installed an ISA network card the other day... took over two hours just to find a friggin' driver that worked for that damn card and I was on-site... so I was holdin' up the works 'cause they only had the one PC for warehouse operations.

Also, I'm gettin' some gentle pressure to get a couple of network printer certs as most service calls are for business locations.

I haven't had a single pentium 4, a rig over 1.2 gigahertz, a GeForce 3 or better video card, or a hard-drive over 20 gigabytes. We haven't built a PC for a customer since I started. Most folks don't update their RAM unless we tell 'em they really should... and we don't usually do that unless they're woefully underpowered.

Most interesting hardware repair I've done was replacing a power supply that literally exploded inside. I took it apart for kicks on my lunch-hour, and the entire side wall was scorched. I'd stay away from "Deer" power supplies if ya ever have the option... not that I'd even know where the hell to find 'em! The circuit board looked like a Radio-Shack garage project...

I also found a Micro-Mania computer that didn't use two IDE cables... they rigged the CD-RW and Hard-drive to the same friggin' cable! Talk about fuggin' cheap (same computer the PSU blew in).

I'm learning a helluva lot, though... and I really do like my job, so it's all good... but I almost envy you dude!