If you own a PC, you need to do driver maintenance. There’s no way around it, and your computer may not work properly without it! Windows has a built-in method for distributing drivers, but not all manufacturers (like Dell, for example) use it. This means you need to go directly to the manufacturer to get your Windows hardware drivers.

Driver Maintenance Can Be A Drag

There’s usually nothing to remind you to update drivers; you have to do that yourself. If you’re busy, you may forget to take time to maintain your PC. (Not a good approach, by the way.) If you’re not technically savvy, you may not realize that you need to update your own drivers. You may also know that you need to update your drivers, but you may not know how, or which drivers you need.

This all adds up to the strong potential that you’ll miss out on important or critical driver updates that your computer needs to ensure proper operation and security. Sometimes, important operating system updates like service packs can help you remember to update your drivers. Other times, your computer hardware just quits working, or starts behaving badly. Occasionally, a little overzealous file system cleaning can result in the deletion of drivers. You can also accidentally replace a good driver with a bad or incorrect one, and because you’re talking about bits and bytes, a driver – just like any other data on the computer – can become corrupted.

As I talked about last week, most users don’t keep backups of their hardware drivers. That complicates things somewhat when you need to reinstall a hardware driver for whatever reason. If downloading and installing drivers isn’t something you do regularly, you may not know what drivers your system needs, where to find them or how to install them.

That’s why I recommend Driver Detective as a solid approach to Windows hardware driver management. Driver Detective installs quickly and manages all aspects of all of your Windows hardware drivers. Driver Detective searches for the correct driver and driver updates for the drivers your system needs. It downloads, installs, monitors and maintains the drivers, and stores a local backup of the driver in case the installed driver becomes corrupted or lost.

You never have to worry about missing a driver update when you let Driver Detective worry about handling the driver maintenance for your system. More than one million users have downloaded Driver Detective and rely on it to keep their system updated and trouble-free!

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Microsoft has gotten a lot of things right with Windows 7, and the operating system fares better in terms of public acceptance than Windows Vista ever did, but some things don’t change and Windows driver maintenance happens to be one of them.

Driver Downloads Not Always Automated

Even though Windows 7 has automatic driver downloading capabilities – as did earlier versions of the Windows OS – that doesn’t always take care of the problem of Windows driver maintenance. In many cases, you the user still have to go out to the manufacturer’s Web site, download the appropriate driver for your system and install it on your own.

If a Windows driver becomes corrupted, Windows won’t automatically detect this and download a replacement copy. Instead, corrupted drivers still load to the extent they’re able to and cause a lot of strange behavior while you figure out that your driver has gone bad!

In other cases, the corrupted driver causes system crashes and hangs when you try to access the affected device. And some users prefer (for whatever reason) to use a particular version of a hardware driver, usually to avoid conflicts with other software or hardware attached to the computer.

Driver Detective is a much saner way to manage your Windows driver maintenance. Driver Detective can search for driver updates on your preferred schedule, and download and install them seamlessly. Driver Detective also makes backup copies of your current driver installations, so if a driver becomes corrupted, you have a replacement driver available to you immediately!

Driver Detective takes the guesswork out of driver downloads. You don’t run the risk of downloading and installing the wrong driver. You don’t need to remember to check the manufacturers’ Web sites for driver updates, and you don’t spend a lot of unproductive time trying to troubleshoot driver problems.

Driver Detective has been well reviewed by Geek Files and Tucows and more than 1,000,000 users have downloaded Driver Detective for use on their computer systems. Driver maintenance is an unrewarding task, to say the least, but Driver Detective can help ensure that your computer hardware has the latest drivers (or the driver set you prefer) and, a backup for each driver your system uses. Driver Detective can also help you ensure that you choose the correct drivers for your unique computer configuration. Download Driver Detective today and take charge of your Windows Driver maintenance!

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Your computer may perform flawlessly for weeks or months. It’s a circumstance that every computer user appreciates. For some mysterious reason, however, your computer may suddenly start to misbehave in some very strange ways. For example, your computer may no longer be able to detect a USB device that’s plugged into it. Or it can detect the device, but can’t access it. Plugging the device into another computer reveals that the device works just fine. So what gives? Hardware driver problems can cause a raft of strange symptoms ranging from the Device Manager failing to recognize a device, to unusual device behavior, to system crashes and more.

Detecting Hardware Driver Failure

At its core, a device driver is a piece of program code. Like any other program code on your computer, your driver code can get fouled up. System crashes have unpredictable effects on your computer, and may result in the loss of data from the hard disk, or a corruption of the existing data that renders a device driver unusable.

The first step is to divide the problem in half. When symptoms first start to appear, you need to decide whether the device or the computer is having trouble. If you can plug the device in question into a different system and determine that it’s working properly, you’re one step closer to the problem, and you know that you should focus your troubleshooting efforts on the computer.

If the computer crashes when you attempt to access the device, or it doesn’t recognize the device when you plug it in, my first step would be to open the Device Manager and verify that the driver is loaded. If it is, but the device is still unrecognized, unload the driver and replace it. Be sure to download and install the latest version of the device driver. Drivers are usually available on the support Web site operated by the device manufacturer.

If the device starts to work after you’ve replaced the driver, you can be fairly confident that the device driver was at fault. The driver could have been corrupted or rendered obsolete by an operating system upgrade or patch.

If replacing the driver doesn’t correct the problem, you may have additional difficulties that you’ll need to correct before you can get back to work. Run the available system diagnostics to check for corruptions in the operating system that may be preventing your device from working properly. If you find issues using one of the disk scanning/repair tools, fix whatever you’ve found and try reloading the device driver again. You might also consider using driver management software like Driver Detective to monitor and maintain your hardware drivers.

In most cases, this should repair the problem. In a very small number of cases, you may need to take more drastic measures like reloading the OS, but this should be considered only as a last resort.

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Windows driver problems can be frustrating – even agonizing. They’re sometimes hard to diagnose and can put you through a lot of grief before you identify and resolve the issue. I have recently encountered a person in this predicament whose solution was to do a completely clean installation of Windows 7.

Drastic Measures Are Rarely Necessary

There was a time when “blowing away” the offending drive and starting over was the preferred option, but I find that as Windows has become more complex and sophisticated, this option becomes less and less attractive. A driver, while exceptionally important, isn’t so integral to the system that a corrupted driver requires an Armageddon-style approach.

I find that avoiding Windows driver problems in the first place is my preferred method of dealing with this. But how do you avoid driver problems? Drivers can be problematic because they become corrupted or outdated, or a conflict arises between a new OS update and the existing driver. Driver problems can also arise when the wrong driver is installed as the result of a faulty update. Firmware updates can also cause driver problems. I’ve even run into issues where two “identical” computers have different revisions of a piece of hardware. Following an update, one works and the other doesn’t. Few, if any of these things are under the control of the user, right?

True, you can’t control corruptions, or OS updates, or firmware updates, and you can’t help which hardware revisions a manufacturer uses in your computer. You may or may not be able to spot a faulty installation, depending upon how well you know your system. So how do I manage this and avoid Windows driver problems? I don’t.

I rely on driver management software – specifically Driver Detective – to manage my Windows drivers. Driver Detective inventories a system, notes the correct drivers for all hardware components and then monitors and manages the drivers. If a driver becomes corrupted, Driver Detective will load a fresh copy of the driver. If a driver is accidentally (or purposely) deleted, Driver Detective will replace it. Driver Detective also monitors driver updates. When a new driver is found, Driver Detective backs up the old driver, downloads the new one, installs it and makes a copy of the new driver. If the new driver doesn’t perform as expected, or causes unanticipated problems, rolling back to the old driver is quick and easy.

I don’t worry about my drivers anymore and I don’t spend time on a Saturday checking for hardware driver updates. I let Driver Detective do the work and I enjoy my weekend!

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