A device driver will be present for each piece of hardware, enabling the operating system to interact with and control it.
There may be hundreds of drivers pre-installed with the operating system, and when the computer boots up, the appropriate drivers are loaded.
Device drivers are stored in files known as the "registry" in Windows.
They are referred to as "configuration files" in Linux.
Different operating systems will require different device drivers for devices like printers, scanners, tablets, cameras, etc.
