If you’re considering upgrading your Windows operating system to Windows 7, and you’re not already a Windows Vista user, you’ll be in for a few surprises – mostly pleasant. Overall, the upgrade process from Vista is easy, but if you skipped Vista and are now trying to move to Windows 7, the process of upgrading will take longer and require more technical skills, especially in the area of Windows drivers.

XP Has No Direct Upgrade Path

If you’re running Windows XP or an earlier version of the operating system, there is no direct upgrade path to Windows 7. That means you’ll need to do a “clean installation.” That involves backing up your data and reinstalling your applications. While this might seem like a daunting task, it will give you the opportunity to evaluate all of the software in your current load. My advice? If you don’t need it, don’t reload it.

For your hardware, you’ll need to do a little research to determine whether your manufacturer has released and updated driver. If so, Windows 7 will often (but not always) install it for you. In itself, this is a time-saver. Dealing with old or missing drivers can be exceptionally time-consuming. Even with the right drivers, things don’t always go smoothly.

The installation process has a few hitches in it, most noticeably one that places the computer in an infinite mid-installation rebooting loop under certain circumstances. This isn’t the universal experience by any means. I upgraded my computer at home (running Vista) in just a few hours with no real issues. Getting the remaining drivers installed and configured, which would have taken an additional evening, was handled by Driver Detective.

I always recommend driver management software. Driver Detective, which has been downloaded and installed by more than a million users, locates, downloads and installs updated drivers for any computer system. After installing the correct drivers, Driver Detective watches over the computer’s drivers, ready to replace old, outdated, corrupted or missing drivers instantly without additional assistance from you.

Finding and installing drivers is among the least-rewarding tasks associated with computer maintenance. Driver updates often sneak up on you, following upgrades and patches. If you don’t have the time to search for updated drivers for your computer, I recommend that you consider letting Driver Detective do the heavy lifting for you.

Photo Credit: Cheon Fong Liew, via Flickr

It seems like no matter who I talk to, their workload is increasing. Cutbacks at companies mean that people have to take on more responsibilities. This leaves them with less time to manage their existing responsibilities and less free time to take care of computer problems like Windows driver problems at home.

Driver Management Has Never Been Easier

As any technician – they’ll tell you that one area in which they spend a lot of (mostly unproductive time) is in the area of driver management for Windows computers. Whether they’re dealing with an update that “breaks” a previously working driver, or a driver gets corrupted or lost, dealing with drivers can be an unpleasant task.

Finding the right driver is just one leg of the journey for a PC technician. Sometimes manufacturers make a number of different versions of a driver, so knowing what you need is the first place to start. Simply finding the right driver doesn’t always get you out of the woods. Installing a new driver can break another driver. You can also find out that what you thought was the right driver isn’t the right one at all. Sometimes new drivers have bugs in them that prevent them from working properly and occasionally, even though a driver is the right one and is installed and working properly, it becomes corrupted, gets uninstalled or accidentally deleted.

All of these things add up to hardware problems. Unfortunately, the driver isn’t always the first suspect. Technicians can spend hours diagnosing and correcting a driver problem. It can get worse when a user tries to do his own diagnosis and repair and ends up creating more problems or making the existing problem worse.

What’s the solution? For me, I always recommend using a driver management software package like Driver Detective. Driver Detective is designed to identify and download the drivers needed for the system it monitors. Anytime a driver stops working, is updated or gets corrupted, Driver Detective steps in to remove the old driver or replace it with a fresh, working copy of the correct driver.

Driver Detective can search through millions of known drivers to find the exact one your system needs. Once the new driver is installed, Driver Detective continues to work, monitoring the operation of your driver. Should anything happen to the driver that affects its performance, Driver Detective has you covered, automatically!

Photo Credit: daybeezho, via Flickr