Diagnosing and solving driver problems can occupy a lot of time, and if you don’t know much about your computer, the task can seem monumental. Nonetheless, some people are naturally interested in what makes their computers tick.

Driver Problem Troubleshooting Tools

Unless you want to go hard-core on your driver problems, there are only a few tools you may want to put in your driver-problem troubleshooting toolkit. Some of these tools will already be loaded on your computer because they come with the system. Others are worth having but you may need to find or buy them.

One free program you may want to consider is called DriverView. DriverView is a nice utility that is available for both the 32- and 64-bit versions of Windows. DriverView is nice because it helps you identify immediately which drivers belong to the operating system and which ones are third-party drivers. I’ve often found that people tend to turn off (or even remove) system drivers they don’t recognize. They do this because they don’t recognize the driver and can’t tell that it rightfully belongs where it is!

Third-party drivers can also be problematic, since sometimes old, obsolete drivers get left behind when a piece of hardware is removed or replaced. The old driver acts like a bit of a zombie, taking up resources that it doesn’t need and potentially causing conflicts with other drivers.

DriverView will provide in-depth information about each driver it finds, and will allow you to get a better picture of the drivers that are loaded, the version number and other important information. Windows does have a command-line tool called driverquery.exe, but for ease of use, I’d recommend DriverView.

DriverView won’t actually diagnose or correct problems with Windows drivers. You could take the information that DriverView gives you and do your own driver research, but I find it easier to let Driver Detective locate the latest drivers and install them. Driver Detective can also diagnose and repair corrupted or missing drivers, which makes it worth its weight in gold. The program will also remove old drivers that are no longer in use. This alone reduces the chance of driver problems because abandoned drivers don’t accumulate, waiting for an opportunity to “rise from the dead.”

Driver Detective isn’t free, but it’s well worth the money. It does a better job of finding and installing the correct drivers for your computer system.

Photo Credit: Nalilo, via Flickr