I’m a big proponent of doing regular Windows driver maintenance. I’ve never been shy about saying that you need to keep your drivers updated. Updating your drivers, however, isn’t the only thing you need to know how to do when it comes to Windows driver maintenance. You also need to know how to install and uninstall new drivers.

Automatic Installation Doesn’t Always Provide Good Results

If you maintain your drivers on your own – that is, you personally download the drivers and go through the installation routine – you may find yourself in a tight spot on occasion. There are times when it is either desirable or necessary to roll back a driver installation – that is, go back to the older version you had been using. If you don’t know how to roll back your driver upgrade/update, you can spend a lot of fruitless and frustrating hours dealing with your non-functional or semi-functional computer, bricked hardware or unexpected system crashes.

Why? Sometimes a new driver update doesn’t work as advertised, or it “breaks” something else you need or want on your computer. In either of these cases, getting your computer back to the condition it was in before the update is the only way to reclaim your lost functions or rid yourself of troublesome software.

If you believe Microsoft, most system crashes are the result of bad third-party drivers. Whether that’s true or not makes little difference when your system has crashed for the umpteenth time and you’re simply trying to get your system back together. If you find yourself in the position of having installed a new driver, and then you experience system crashes, instabilities, or your attached hardware no longer works properly, you may want to roll back the suspect driver to an earlier version. To do this, you’ll need the Device Manager.

Access the Device Manager through the Run box under the Start menu by entering “Device Manager” and press Enter. The Device Manager manages all devices connected to your computer, so you’ll need to find the “category” your suspect driver falls into. Double-click on the suspect to open the Properties dialog box. Under the Driver tab, you’ll find a button labeled “Roll back driver.” This option should uninstall the suspect driver and reinstall the next most-recent version.

If this seems like a lot of work, it is. That’s why I recommend Driver Detective as an alternative to maintaining your drivers manually. Driver Detective will seek out, download, install and maintain a copy of the current driver, as well as historical drivers that enable you to roll back to an earlier version. If your current driver becomes corrupted, Driver Detective has everything on hand to reinstall a fresh copy of the driver automatically. Download a copy today and see for yourself what a difference Driver Detective can make.

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On Tuesday, Microsoft released the long awaited kernel mode driver patch that will close the Duqu vulnerability. The Duqu worm has been making the rounds for several months and takes advantage of a weakness in the True Type Font engine. Last month, as a temporary fix, Microsoft distributed a workaround that basically disabled the vulnerable code.

Duqu Shares Some Traits of Stuxnet

In the months that it was in the wild, Duqu was widely distributed throughout Europe and the United States. The vulnerability was particularly troublesome because it will allow a malefactor to gain administrative access to an infected computer, and will allow the installation and execution of software, administrative tasks like account creation and the compromise of user data.

The Patch Tuesday delivery contained 13 updates for various flaws. Originally, Microsoft planned to roll out 14 patches, but one was pulled back to address some compatibility issues. With Tuesday’s rollout, Microsoft has delivered 99 updates so far in 2011. The company hasn’t necessarily closed the books on updates, though. Microsoft often issues a minor “Patch Tuesday” on the fourth Tuesday of the month, which this year falls on December 27.

In addition to putting the brakes on Duqu, Microsoft addressed 18 other known vulnerabilities in 12 patches. Those vulnerabilities included critical or important holes in Active X, Windows Media Player/Windows Media Center, Microsoft Office, Microsoft Publisher, Microsoft PowerPoint, Microsoft Excel, Microsoft Active Directory and Internet Explorer that could potentially allow the execution of code by a remote user. Microsoft also fixed “important” vulnerabilities in Office, the client/server runtime system and the Windows kernel that could allow a malicious user to gain additional privileges.

Microsoft also took the opportunity to release a new version of the Microsoft Windows Malicious Software Removal Tool, presumably equipped to do battle with Duqu. The worm was officially discovered on September 1 by researchers at the Budapest University of Technology and Economics. Despite the Star Wars-esque sounding name, the Budapest researchers named the worm based on files the malware creates, which are prefixed with the characters “-DQ.”

Despite extensive research, Duqu’s purpose isn’t known. The worm bears a strong resemblance to Stuxnet, and was originally mistaken for Stuxnet by some Internet security firms. Like Stuxnet, Duqu makes use of stolen signed security certificates and also appears to uninstall itself after 36 days of active infection. Attacking servers have been found in Germany, Belgium and China, but security experts are still unsure of Duqu’s intended targets.

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Microsoft has learned the hard way from Vista (and to a lesser extent, Windows 7) the importance of getting third-party drivers available when rolling out a new OS. That very hard lesson – which is credited with sinking the commercial success of Vista – is once again being dusted off in preparation for the Windows 8 release. Will third-party drivers still be problematic for the latest iteration of the Windows OS?

Driver Development Isn’t Controlled By Microsoft

Unfortunately, Microsoft still faces the same challenges regarding drivers for third-party hardware it faced for all other releases of Windows. Another not-so-fortunate fact is that Windows 8 is substantially different from Windows 7/Vista. The hardware manufacturers are going to have to come through in order to ensure that Windows 8 is a commercial success.

One of the big differences this time around is that consumers actually want Windows 8. Windows 8 is designed to provide big-time support to the mobile computing devices users simply can’t seem to get enough of. That will serve as a good motivator for some third-party manufacturers to get their drivers out the door and in good working order on Launch Day – whenever that might be.

Don’t get me wrong. Windows 8 isn’t meant exclusively for mobile devices. There will still be reasons (and hopefully good ones) to update non-mobile computers to the newest OS, too. Mobile device manufacturers will be ready out of the gate. The question still remains for the non-mobile device manufacturers – do they plan to come to the party?

Windows 8 represents a very different shift from Windows 7, so initially, users can expect some delays in getting device drivers for their current devices. They can also expect some manufacturers to drop support for even relatively new devices, as they did when Vista first hit store shelves. The standard issues with device compatibility will arise, and a large number of users – particularly at the enterprise level – will wait until the first service pack or better to migrate to Windows 8.

The “first service pack” benchmark is telltale. Those third party manufacturers who have updated drivers by that point are in the game, and those who haven’t produced working drivers for their existing hardware probably won’t. For those users who have just upgraded to Windows 7, the prospect of going on more device driver hunts probably isn’t too exciting.

Nonetheless, Windows 8 is rumored for a late-2012 release. With review copies already on the street, the pressure is officially on third-party manufacturers to build drivers that are ready for business on Opening Day.

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Most home users don’t know (or care) about Trim, but Trim support is something like the Holy Grail for commercial computing. Trim is a command that allows an operating system to mark blocks on solid-state drives (SSD) for cleaning and re-use. Doesn’t sound exciting yet? Without Trim, using solid-state drives in Redundant Array of Independent Disks (RAID) arrays becomes very hard because blocks that could be used can’t be easily identified, and in the end, the performance of the entire setup suffers. Intel has just indicated that it plans to offer Trim support in an upcoming Intel driver release.

Not The First Time Trim Support Has Been Announced

Keep in mind that this isn’t an official announcement for Trim support, and also keep in mind that we were led to believe that Trim support would be introduced in 2009. With that having been said, getting real Trim support could make life a lot less complicated for users who rely on RAID 0 storage schemes for data.

Home users aren’t likely to be impacted at all by the addition of Trim support, but enterprise users will welcome the ability to include SSD in RAID storage arrays. SSDs offer some big advantages over their traditional counterparts in terms of space, cost and reliability, but not being able to make efficient use of space has been a serious downer.

The changes, according to Intel, will be released in the 11.5 version of Intel’s Alpha Rapid Storage Technology (RST) driver. The next release is version 11.0, so Trim support is still on the horizon. The ability to support RAID 0 is the first step toward extending support to RAID 1 and RAID 5 setups.
Windows 7 already supports Trim for SSDs, but that support doesn’t extend to RAID arrays. In other words, Trim works on single SSDs in Windows 7, but not in storage arrays. Intel hasn’t provided a timetable for the release of its version 11.5 RST drivers, but the support will be welcome whenever it comes.

Currently, without Trim support, the performance of SSD arrays over time seriously degrades as storage disks become filled with data. Without the ability to identify disk blocks that can be wiped and re-used, the user effectively has no way to defragment an SSD RAID array. Any user who has worked on a badly fragmented drive will immediately understand the implications of that!

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