driver
access
™
Intel Driver Website Tutorial
Intel has been around a long time, and is best known for their processing unit manufacturing and perhaps their long line of motherboards. Since the formation of the company they have slowly branched out to include other components in their production facilities, such as display chipsets, and video cards optimized for 3d gaming. Though they do not manufacture complete desktop or laptop systems themselves, since the components they are responsible for bringing to the market are quite literally at the core of the computing experience, they work very closely with companies that do create and market such systems. From integration to optimization, the company has a hand in the design and production process of many of the most popular complete systems available today. They continue to specialize most specifically in processor manufacture, however.
The most likely scenario in which you will come to require drivers from Intel is when dealing with one of its chipsets, whether for video rendering or motherboard functions. Their official website can logically be found at "www.intel.com". When visiting their homepage you will be greeted with a large image and little textual information, and given the option so select a link to one of three main subsections; one is an "about" page which displays information about the company itself, and the other two will take you to either business or home oriented pages. Hovering over one of these three links will cause a drop-down menu to appear beneath it, showing the basic content which is contained within each one. You may notice that none of the information is particularly relevant to obtaining drivers, and indeed there is a faster way to reach that section compared to trudging through the information linked to from those three main buttons. Take a close look in the upper right hand corner of the page, and you'll find a tiny link labeled simply with the word "support" followed by an arrow icon. Clicking this will take you to the driver page much faster than the alternative routes.
On this page you can either try searching for your device's model number for a chance at being taken directly to the driver download page you're looking for, or instead click the "Browse for drivers and software" link which can be found on the left hand side of the page inside a small column entitled "Update Intel drivers & software." You are also given the option to allow Intel's website to attempt to detect what Intel-branded hardware you have installed, but this is only useful if the device for which you are attempting to obtain drivers is already installed. For the purposes of this tutorial, since this option may not be viable for everyone we're going to browse manually instead. Click that link to be taken to the next step. You can either search by using keywords or your device's model identification information, or use the list on the left hand side to browse by category. If you're having trouble identifying a chipset that you might be using, you can find a link on this page to a free software download which will determine this for you, again assuming that the drivers you're looking for are for hardware within the system you are using to browse the website.
Using the list on the left is quite simple; hover your mouse over whichever component category is applicable to your hardware and a sub-menu will appear with more specific results. There are nested sub-menus within sub-menus, so just keep going until you find your hardware. In the image provided I'm using desktop integrated graphics chipsets as an example. Once you've clicked the link for your hardware, you'll be taken to its specific software and driver download page, where you'll be asked to choose the operating system under which the drivers you need are to be installed. Once you've made your selection, you must press the "Go!" button beneath the menu bar.
You'll generally be given two choices as to what form your driver download file or files will take, either a compressed ".zip" archive or as an executable. I personally recommend using the executable format, as it will save steps during installation. Right click on the download link of your choice, in this case an ".exe" and select "Save as..." from the menu that follows. Navigate to an easy-to-find location such as the desktop, and click the "Save" button. Once the download is complete, navigate to that location or folder and double click on the file's icon to begin the installation process. From here the process is self-explanatory; just follow the on-screen prompts and directions displayed by the installer and make all the appropriate selections. When the installation is complete you will be notified, and will likely have to restart your computer so that the changes can take effect. Congratulations, you're all done at this point! if you wish, you may delete the file that you downloaded or alternately archive it in case it becomes needed in the future.