I often encounter people who believe their computer is up-to-date. They’ve set Windows to download updates automatically (not a bad thing), and they assume that the rest of their software is kept up-to-date. Unfortunately, people don’t always distinguish between “Windows” and the rest of the stuff on their computer. “The rest of the stuff” includes Windows driver updates, which may or may not be automatically loaded.

Windows Can Be Set To Retrieve Driver Updates

Microsoft realized a long time ago that their flagship product had a major vulnerability over which they had virtually no control: third-party driver updates. Aside from a limited number of peripherals, Microsoft doesn’t make hardware. They make software.

The software they make runs the computer itself, and they also make a large number of applications. Since they don’t make hardware, they don’t make Windows drivers – which tell Microsoft’s software how to operate a piece of attached hardware. A problem may arise when Microsoft changes its operating system software. Hardware drivers may not work properly, and Microsoft must rely on hardware manufacturers to make the necessary changes to support their devices under the updated (or upgraded) operating system.

Microsoft doesn’t make changes without notice, in most cases. Security issues may be corrected without much warning from Microsoft, but in terms of operating system upgrades, the manufacturers have plenty of notice that changes are coming. Unfortunately, some manufacturers may not make the necessary changes to support older equipment. Sometimes the age of the hardware has nothing to do with a manufacturer’s decision to support or not support OS revisions.

When the vendor makes Microsoft aware of a new hardware driver, Microsoft can distribute it as a “critical update.” Microsoft doesn’t always get the latest hardware drivers from third-party vendors, which ultimately means that some users who think their computers are up-to-date are mistaken. Windows driver updates can pass by unnoticed.

That’s why I use and recommend Driver Detective. Driver Detective is a driver management software program that seeks out, downloads, installs and monitors hardware drivers. Driver Detective keeps track of the drivers your computer uses, and detects and corrects problems before they become a problem for you.

Driver Detective keeps a backup copy of the most current driver and monitors driver performance to ensure that your computer hardware will work correctly all the time. Driver Detective saves a lot of time and effort on the user’s part. With Driver Detective installed, you don’t have to go out to the manufacturer’s Web site to determine whether a driver update is available. I’m all for anything that saves time and effort, which I why I’m all for Driver Detective.

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Windows drivers should be kept updated. That’s sound advice under any circumstances, but many users don’t update their drivers regularly, don’t have Windows configured to get new drivers, or use a driver management software program like Driver Detective. This can cause problems in more ways than one.

Driver Updates Provide More Than Just Working Devices

Keeping updated drivers – and by that I mean installed drivers as well as backups of the latest drivers – can actually save you a lot of time. How so? Life has a way of making a mess of things that are working just fine. Hard disks, for example, can crash without warning. If you have backed up your files, you haven’t lost any work. Most people use backups to back up their applications, but often they don’t back up their system – ostensibly to save space.

You don’t really have to choose between backing up your system and backing up your files, but in the end, if you HAD to choose between one or the other, you’d back up your files on the theory that you can restore the system from disk, right? Well, restoring the system from disk gets you back to square one. (And by square one, I mean Square One.)

You won’t get any of the system updates or patches; you’ll need to download and install those. You won’t get any of your third-party drivers; you’ll also need to download and install those. You may need to download and install several iterations of the driver, including all of the appropriate updates.

If you haven’t been careful, you could lose the drivers for any old, obsolete or unusual hardware you have. You may have a hard time finding the correct driver or a suitable substitute. All of your configurations will be gone too. In all, losing a hard drive can cost you several hours – if not days – of reconfiguring, re-installing and restoring. It’s your basic bummer. There’s no other way to describe it.

Using a driver management software package like Driver Detective saves you tons of time. Driver Detective manages all of your drivers and saves copies of current drivers. It also backs up your registry so you don’t lose configurations. You can use Driver Detective in conjunction with a backup scheme to protect your data, your system, your drivers and your updates. If you have your entire system protected, you can save hours of recovery time after serious data loss.

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As a technician, there are few things more valuable to me than my time. You can spend an incredible amount of time troubleshooting problems, and believe me, when it comes to computers, there seem to be an infinite number of problems. Things that cause problems (but don’t have to) are high on my list of tasks to eliminate. Updating Windows drivers falls into this category.

More Than One Way To Update Windows Drivers

There’s more than one way to update windows drivers, but the most time-intensive one is the one you should strive to eliminate. For a long time, nothing in the Windows OS could tell you that there was a new driver update. That meant going to the PC, noting the driver version(s) installed on your computer and visiting the manufacturer Web site to check for, download and install Windows driver updates.

On the surface, it sounds easy and compared to say, putting a man on the moon, downloading drivers is definitely easier. On the other hand, visiting ten manufacturers’ Web sites could take an hour. Downloading, installing and testing each driver could take another hour. If the new driver causes problems or breaks something else, that’s even more troubleshooting time you could be committing yourself to.

So, Windows now downloads driver updates right to your computer, right? If the manufacturer made its driver updates available to Microsoft, and if you have your computer configured to download driver updates, and Microsoft chooses the right driver update for your computer, then yes, you can get driver updates when you patch your OS.

That doesn’t always guarantee that you’ll get the driver you need when you need it. If updates to your computer are available only once per month, you might be waiting for driver updates. Additionally, you might not get the driver you need for your computer. You may still be sent off to search for the driver on your own. If the driver you have is the right one, but it gets corrupted, you might still be looking at manual driver updates.

I save time and effort by using Driver Detective to manage my Windows drivers. Driver Detective finds the correct driver for your system, downloads it, installs it and backs it up. It also monitors the driver to make sure it’s working correctly. All of this saves me time. I don’t have to keep track of my Windows drivers because Driver Detective will do that for me, and save me a lot of time and hassle in the process.

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Microsoft has made a lot of improvements to the Windows operating system since it hit the market. With Windows Vista, Microsoft learned the importance of having updated Windows drivers. What Microsoft learned is how little control it has over third-party driver manufacturers and how hard it can be to get them to update their products.

The Cost Of Not Having Drivers

Microsoft can’t be expected to hit a home run each time it steps up to the plate, but without having updated Vista drivers for hardware, there’s little incentive to upgrade for the home user. In some ways, Microsoft can force an upgrade by not allowing manufacturers to ship with an older version of the Windows OS – which Microsoft did to address customer complaints – but that just pushes the problem farther down the line.

We’re at that point right now with Windows 7. Windows 7 was meant to install on top of Windows Vista. The penalty for having skipped Vista is that the user must then do a “clean” install, which turns out to be a messy prospect. Windows 7 came with a raft of third party drivers, but that doesn’t free the user from having to do manual updates.

Having done them countless times, I can say that manual driver updates can be painful. Now, Windows can download and install driver updates if the system is configured to do so and if Windows Update has found (or been handed) an updated driver. If not, you’re manually updating your computer either as often as you remember, or when you start having hardware problems.

I’ve solved this problem by using a driver management tool called Driver Detective. Driver Detective does more than just locate the correct driver for a particular installation. It locates, downloads and installs updated drivers automatically. It also archives the correct driver on the hard disk and monitors the operation of each driver so that it can quickly reload a driver that’s been damaged or deleted.

What I like best about Driver Detective is that it saves me the time of having to go out and locate new drivers or find old versions of drivers that I want to use. I don’t have to wonder about whether a driver is current. Driver Detective finds out for me. I don’t have to figure out whether a driver is corrupted, because not only does Driver Detective figure that out, it also replaces bad drivers.

Not every IT “tool” is worth having , but Driver Detective is one of those software packages that is. If you haven’t already, download a copy and see for yourself how easy it can be to make driver management problems a thing of the past.

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