I will not list the make and model of my laptop as I want this question to help others and not be specific to me. However, this is for Windows (specifically Windows 7).
I found a program This program lists all the drivers on your computer that lists all the drivers and their company. 184 out of the 215 drivers are Microsoft drivers, so I am assuming that these get updated via Windows Update. But the remaining 31 drivers are up to the user to maintain and keep up to date.
I am wondering if there is a capable and praised application, or convenient "superuser" type method out there, that looks at all the hardware and drivers and checks to see if there is an updated version for them, and points/provides the link to the drivers download. Besides that, the only way I know is to try googling the driver, looking for the operating system specific version of it, and seeing if the most recent version is higher than my installed version. This is tedious, and is not something that can be kept up with daily. Therefore, from my knowledge,there is no way to know exactly when a new driver update comes out, until I do the google check, which could be days weeks after the update came out.
If anyone has a convenient method, or knows of a program (paid or free, as long as it is capable), please let me know!
Thank you for any help.