Device Management The path between the operating system and virtually all hardware not on the computer's motherboard goes through a special program called a driver . Much of a driver's function is to be the translator between the electrical signals of the hardware subsystems and the high-level programming languages of the operating system and application programs. Drivers take data that the operating system has defined as a file and translate them into streams of bits placed in specific locations on storage devices, or a series of laser pulses in a printer. Because there are such wide differences in the hardware controlled through drivers, there are differences in the way that the driver programs function, but most are run when the device is required, and function much the same as any other process. The operating system will frequently assign high-priority blocks to drivers so that the hardware resource can be release...