Tip #3413 - DriverMax
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DriverMax
Drivers, in
respect to personal computers, are the software that enables a hardware
device, such as a printer or a scanner for instance, to properly communicate
with the system. Driver incompatibility, corruption and conflict are usually
the problems that I run across when I have to troubleshoot some uncooperative
device.
Installing drivers
is also one of the procedures that can take considerable time when, for
instance, installing a new operating system. Every hardware device connected
to your PC, with a few exceptions, has to have drivers installed and updated.
This means that you need to find all the disks that came with the device
and load them in manually. This can take some time and believe it or not,
it’s not that much fun.
But, with this week's
download, you can be the driver master while exercising complete and utter
control of your system's device drivers. DriverMax is
a driver tool that allows you to perform numerous operations with your
system drivers that I have never seen before. I am really excited about
this one!
With DriverMax, you
can aggregate detailed information regarding your system’s drivers,
such as what devices are using a particular driver, the date of creation
and the number of files that make up a particular driver.
If you choose to look
at the Details of a particular driver, you can actually
see the files that make up the driver and any other devices that may use
them.
DriverMax is totally
free, but for continued use, you are going to need to send for a free
registration number that Innovative Solutions sends to you via e-mail.
You can search for
drivers by category as well. Just want the USB drivers on your system?
Then select it from the drop down menu and hit Next.
A list of all the USB drivers will then be presented to you. You can take
this generated list of drivers and save it as a text file or you can view
it in a browser using the HTML option.
All these features
are fantastic, but I saved the best for last, which is the ability to
extract a copy of your device drivers to a file. You can then take this
driver file and burn it to a CD, creating a backup of your system’s
drivers. “Now, that’s cool!” This is a great feature
for a couple of reasons. First of all, you can save all your system’s
drivers in one centralized location, so there will be no more hunting
for all sorts of driver disks, because you'll have them all in one spot.
In addition to that, you can constantly update
your driver disks to make sure you always have the newest versions
of your system's drivers. This means that if you do have to reinstall
a device, you will not have to update the drivers on top of everything
else.
As a matter of fact,
Innovative Solutions,
the creator of DriverMax claims that you can have all your drivers installed
on a brand new system (fresh installation of Windows, with no drivers)
in five to 10 minutes. That’s amazing! It would take me five minutes
to find all my drivers for my PC, And installing them, well, that could
take the better part of an hour at least.
Oh, and by the way,
the new version of DriverMax works on Windows Vista (and XP, of course).
Again, that's pretty darn cool!
I hope you enjoy DriverMax
and find it as useful as I do. It can really save you a considerable amount
of time if the need ever arises, which is always nice!
You can download DriverMax
here.
~ Chad Stelnicki
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