Uniblue Driver Scan

Drivers are one of those things that work in the PC’s background and usually you don’t give them much thought or attention.

UPDATE: Uniblue has updated this software for 2009 – I tried it again and while the screens are slightly different, the functionality is the same. It remains a comprehensive way to keep a PC current with the latest drivers, many of which are not all that apparent for users to easily find and more importantly, to find the source to update. Overall, still worth a look.

Original Review:

They are essential and typically they are updated over time for bug fixes and enhanced functionality. Unless you’re really attentive and know where all the drivers reside, keeping them up to date is not normally something to which users pay much attention.

The good guys at Uniblue sent me a copy of Uniblue DriverScanner to try out. This software finds all your PC’s drivers, determines if there is a more current version available and allows you to choose which to update – pretty nifty! After a quick install, I started the scan as shown below:

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After about five minutes, it reported the following:

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I would never have known that any of these were out of date, especially for those that are buried in the system such as the Intel drivers. You have the opportunity to back up any, or all, drivers

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so that if for some reason there is an issue, you can go back to the older driver. If you’ve ever wondered how many drivers you have, you get this summary screen:

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You can back up all your drivers or just select the ones that you are updating – turns out the list is quite long:

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Once I backed up all the drivers, I started the download process (one button) and DriverScanner proceeded to download the updates:

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For all the drivers that were out of date, one could not be updated due to a missing file:

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You can choose to ignore the driver in subsequent scans – I updated most drivers and the scan shows this:

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Conclusions

Uniblue’s DriverScanner certainly can keep any PC easily up to date, although I did find that one of the drivers could not be updated. DriverScanner’s Back-up function is particularly handy – you can back up the system’s drivers on an external drive and use DriverScanner to restore all your drivers if you do a clean OS reinstall.

Can you survive with outdated drivers? Sure, but sometimes when a PC gets twitchy, one thing to try is updating drivers. DriverScanner makes it pretty much a one-button operation.