Old official drivers

Hi ...!
Some companies don't offer newer drivers for their laptops. For example, my drivers are for 22H2 and I want to install them on 25H2.
What's your recommendation? Is it better to install drivers from hardware manufacturer support webpage (e.g. AMD)?

It depends on what driver you need.
If it's something like a Chipset driver, or an iGPU driver, then get it directly from the source (AMD, etc).

For other random drivers, it's okay to use older drivers. Windows 11 will work with drivers going all the way back to Windows Vista (64-bit)

Windows Update will install a lot of drivers automatically. If the date on the driver from Windows Update is newer, then no need to use the older driver from the Laptop website.

Laptops drivers should always be downloaded from the laptop manufacturer.

allan said:

Laptops drivers should always be downloaded from the laptop manufacturer.

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But some of them are so old

Okay they're old, what difference does that make? If the laptop mfg things they need updating, they'll upload new drivers. No harm in checking every now and then.

Sheikh said:

But some of them are so old

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Look at it this way: If they're old, they're probably problem-free. You have to watch out for manufacturers who are releasing Drivers du Jour, a sign that they're constantly swatting bugs.

Just to contrast (and not start trouble) my work laptop is a Dell Latitude 5450 and the number of times I've had to reboot it during the day because Desktop Support released yet another Official Dell BIOS patch is astounding. It makes you wonder...

allan said:

Okay they're old, what difference does that make? If the laptop mfg things they need updating, they'll upload new drivers. No harm in checking every now and then.

Click to expand...

In a perfect world maybe. But in reality many laptops don't get new drivers once they are a few years old or more. It's just too easy for companies to not support older models. If it's an old enough laptop, the newest drivers available might be Windows 8 or Windows 7 drivers. They might still work but if you have newer drivers available, there is no advantage to using the older ones. Context also really matters. My laptop has a Quadro RTX for example. I'm certainly not waiting for new Quadro drivers to appear on the laptop website... I just use the RTX App to download new drivers directly from Nvidia. It would be silly if not downright masochistic to do otherwise.