Hardware drivers? Yikes! I do the security updates, but everytime I've installed one of their hardware drivers, it's whacked a machine.
I never, never use their auto hardware drivers, prefer to get them from the mfg.
I almost always get them from the manufacturer myself, but this seems to have nicely fixed my very annoying connection problems and internet lag of the past few weeks. They were drivers for my network card. I'd actually tried to find newer drivers but hadn't been able to track them down. Microsoft actually done good! I should mark this day on my calendar..
Amen to that. My laptop's DVD/CD drive kept locking up the computer on a random basis -- it was using the driver provided by Windows Update. I went to Toshiba's site and found a more recent driver, and my problems are solved.
The big thing is that Windows Update will apparently only push drivers that have gone through "XP Compatibility Testing" or some such thing -- manufacturers aren't going to re-certify drivers for every little update, so you wind up with out-of-date drivers via Windows Update.