Computers are so embedded in to our daily lives now we barely give them a second thought. We trust them with taking care of every digital need, from storing memories and media to organising our homes. But their very ubiquity means we've become complacent with maintenance and it's only when something goes wrong that we realise how much we need them.

While we regularly take out cars in for servicing, the humble PC rarely gets a look in. It's not until you're sitting at the end of crashed system that most users decide to take action to get it back on track.

You would've thought that PCs, being no more than calculators with delusions of grandeur, would rarely crash. A PC is no more than a set of computational instructions with no room for human error so what could possibly go wrong….right? As it turns out, quite a lot.

There are so many variables involved in having a working system. Every component and peripheral you use to navigate your PC, laptop or netbook needs to work in harmony. But every component and peripheral in your system is designed by different manufacturers because PCs are open systems. Not only does this myriad of hardware need to work together, but it also has to talk the same language as any one of the vast amount of software options available.

Here in lies one of the biggest hurdles PC users face every day, many without realising it. If you don't get every inch of your system working in a harmonious balance, it will crash and burn. Exactly what happens when your system crashes depends on what caused the crash but, even a simple problem can take days to fix. For the lucky few it will simply mean the system will automatically send the crash details to Microsoft's Windows Error Reporting Service. For the rest, it could mean a complete system re-install and lost digital memories - especially if you haven't backed up your data.

This common language that systems use to get every piece of hardware working in conjunction with each other is known as the device driver. These drivers allow every piece of hardware in your PC to talk to your operating system - not just the internal hardware like the graphics card but external hardware as well. Every time you buy and plug in a printer, camera, monitor, mouse or keyboard, they'll need their own driver so Windows or whatever operating system you're using can talk to it. Sometimes Windows automatically picks up the driver if you're online though most manufacturers still bundle the drivers on a CD for you to install.

If these device drivers aren't communicating properly, they may as well be talking gibberish. But the implications are far, far worse for your system. In fact, 80 percent of system crashes are caused by faulty or out of date drivers.

It sounds like a difficult problem to resolve and sorting out driver conflict is not the best way to spend a Saturday night. You might end stuck in customer service phone limbo, racking up the phone bills trying to find out why the new printer you bought isn't working properly when you should be out painting the town red.

Ensuring best practice by making sure every individual driver on your system is up to the job is good policy. Regular system maintenance will always be advisable but if you get it wrong, it's easy to make things worse. Even if you think you've solved the problems, your best laid plans could go awry because manufacturers tend to update their drivers every six month. Additionally, device drivers need to be installed in the correct order - or you could cause even bigger problems. That'll put you back to square one despite your best efforts.

There are some simple things you can do to take the chore out of system maintenance and making sure your drivers are working properly. The Bootstrap team has developed a simple but effective driver update tool that takes the onus of responsibility away from the end user. This should help take to worry out of doing a driver update and will give you security and protection against certain types of system crashes.

DriverHive can automatically scan your PC to identify out of date drivers for FREE and let you choose which ones you'd like to update. The software also automatically creates a system restore point on the PC before an update. If you are having any issues, this ensures you can roll your system back.

If there's one thing DriverHive can't do it's protect your system from EVERY crash error. With most of the word now connected online, systems are susceptible to a whole world of nasty hacks, viruses, and malware exploits that can clog or kill your system. It is a big bad world out there that doesn't have a one-stop-shop universal balm to cure all. However, you can have peace of mind from applications like DriverHive that were designed to address 80 percent of the issues that cause system crashes. Not a bad start at all.