Old school way was installing peripheral, or even sometimes internal hardware drivers and apps, manually from the vendors website or disk. Modern Windows checks your hardware and the vendors send MS updates to the MS "repository" of drivers and apps. As part of the auto updates Microsoft pushes your system will be fed vendor updates for your hardware.

For the layperson this is helpful, but it is annoying as heck when you have your own application that needs a specific driver version and windows keeps trying to overwrite it.