Re: Driverpack Solutions
Kian Trip
Anyone have any experience with DriverPack Solution? Ive been told that its a very good website to find outdated drivers on the system and a very good resource for locating the most recent drivers for your hardware.
Example: I used the util to find or locate outdated drivers on the machine. It came back and said my drivers are good. However, after installation of this driverpack17, it found 9 drivers that need updated.
While it is not really necessary to update computer drivers regularly, I'd recommend to check for updates on a regular basis to make sure you do not miss stability, security or performance updates. The video card is probably the device that is kept up to date on many systems more than other hardware as gamers know that the latest version of Nvidia's latest GeForce drivers and AMD's Catalyst drivers often improve performance and compatibility on their systems.
Programs like SlimDrivers or Device Doctor automate the process by scanning the system for outdated drivers and providing the means to update those drivers afterwards. Many of the programs that we have reviewed in the past have turned commercial after having been available for free or as lite versions for some time.
DriverPack Solution is a special case as both the lite and full version of the program are freely available. The difference is mainly one of size, with the full version packing a whooping 3 Gigabytes of drivers and data that the lite version does not ship with. Another difference is that you can download the lite version of the driver updater from the official website, while the full version is only available via a torrent download or as a purchased DVD.
When you first start the program after installation you will notice that it is running a scan right away. It does not take long to complete and core hardware of your computer is displayed in the program interface afterwards.
Here you see your computer's BIOS, the processor and the core temperatire, the RAM, all hard drives and other system related information. Options to run cleanups, defrags and to test the memory are provided right here.
Not all tabs are functional in the lite version. Only the Misc tab, highlighting all drivers that the program has identified, the search tab, which offers to search for drivers that need updating on the web, and the backup tab, which offers to backup system drivers, are functional.
A click on a driver in the search tab - those that need updating are listed here - offers to either install the update automatically which triggers a driver download, or redirect the user to a search page on a driver download website.
Ads are displayed in several areas of the program. You find a driver update link in the main interface leading to a commercial offering to update system drivers, and two links to commercial backup solutions in the backup tab. On top of that, the installer is also listing adware offers.
The program for the most part seems to work quite well. It had a issue identifying the NVIDIA GeForce driver on the system, displaying the driver as unknown in the interface, but other than that, it seems to have identified drivers properly. Another issue that I ran into was that it did not display driver versions of installed drivers. While it listed one device driver as outdated on the Search page, it failed to mention the version of that driver, which in turn made it impossible to find out if the drivers listed on the search results page were indeed newer than the installed one. You can resolve that with a little bit of digging on your own though.
I have been using DriverMax for quite some time now, and it is the best driver updater program I have seen. Free users can only download 2 drivers per day which is not bad. It gives you the option to create a restore point before each update, so that in case something does not work as expected, you can roll it back which can be down within the program, with windows restore, or by accessing the device properties in device manager.
Having said that, in my experience updating the video/graphics drivers from 3rd party programs can cause problems, specially in computers that have integrated graphics drivers which shift between a NVIDIA/AMD and an intel graphics depending on computer load. For example, some vaio computer have a switch [Stamina/Speed] which changes the Graphics processor in use from NVIDIA to intel.
I agree with others comments that you need to be very careful with these kind of apps. I decided to try the lite version, just to see what it would find. It would not let me install it. Redownloaded and same problem. It said I did not have the right permissions. I was using an administrator account and tried running the installer in administrator mode.
I want to share this experience with driver pack solution. I formatted my laptop (i have 2 laptops), one with windows 7 and another linux mint. I formatted and then installed windows XP. The chief concern was drivers. I downloaded the driverpack, i have selected only for XP and downloaded. It automatically checked the laptop model no and configuration and installed chipset,video,audio,lan and wireless. However just bluetooth was missing.
To some extent, you are write martin..if driver is supposed to get updated, it should provide version no and changelog, which is very hard to find by. Overall i like driverpack for hassle free installation
One one occasion, the program told me that my Logitech keyboard and mouse Drivers needed to be updated and the version number was non-existent, according to Logitech!
The same with my Nvidia drivers!