Owning a computer is not all cupcakes and lollipops. There is a lot of upkeep and maintenance that is involved, and if you don’t keep up on it, your computer can become slow and may even stop working. Drivers are one of the things that need to be kept up-to-date, and if they are neglected than your devices may not function correctly. However, keeping track of all your drivers can be a pain. Fortunately, DriveScanner from Uniblue can help.

Features

• Scan your hard drive for out-dated drivers
• Download and install the latest drivers right from DriveScanner.
• Backup Drivers for easy reinstall and restore.

DriveScanner can be setup to automatically scan the computer regularly for out-of-date drivers.

When newer drivers are found, you can start the download and install process, directly from DriveScanner.

Drivers can be backed-up in case you need to reinstall the OS or restore the drivers.

Design

DriveScanner is divided up into several tabs. Each of the tabs serves a distinct and important purpose.

The first tab is Overview, and this is the place to go to see what is happening with the software and with your system. This screen will also show what version of the driver database you are using.

The next tab is Driver Scan, and this tab has three screens attached to it. The top screen is Driver Scan. This screen is where you can start a scan of your drivers and also select which drivers you want to scan for. The next screen is the Scan Results, and this is where you can see a list of all the drivers, including those that are up-to-date and those that are out-of-date. The last screen is the Download history where you can see which drivers have been downloaded.

The third tab is Backup, and is used to make a backup of all the drivers that are on the computer. This is useful in case you need to reinstall the operating system, or if one of the drivers gets corrupted.

The next tab is the Restore tab, and works directly with the Backup tab. Here you are shown all backups that have been made and their location. Luckily, backups are nothing more than zip files, so you can still get to the drivers even if you don’t have DriveScanner installed.

The last tab is Settings. There are a few things that you can change here, but nothing that is really important.

Performance

DriveScanner makes things really easy by taking the work of finding drivers away from the user. Installing DriveScanner is really simple. There aren’t too many options, so all you need to do is click next until it’s done.

Once it’s done installing, the next thing to do is run it. Fortunately, running the program is also easy. The first thing that needs to be done is for the software to scan the computer and identify all the devices and if the drivers are up-to-date.

Most likely it will find a couple of items that are out of date. As you can see, DriveScanner found a couple of devices on my computer that did not have the latest drivers. The next step is to choose which updates to install, there is also a button to install all the updates.

Each of the drivers that I installed had its own installer. The only thing DriveScanner did was download it for me and start it up. Once the installer was running, DriveScanner was not needed. After the install finished, DriveScanner marked the device as up-to-date and moved on to the next device.

Once both devices were updated I moved on to testing the backup and restore process. Backing up the software is easy, but can be lengthy if you have a lot of devices.

Restoring the drivers is also very easy. Just like everything else, all you have to do is follow the instructions. The first thing to do is select which driver to restore. At this point it is only possible to restore one driver at a time. Once you have selected a driver, DriverScanner proceeds to restore the files to their former location. As the warning says, it is important to restart the computer after each restore.

During my testing an update to the software became available, so I decided to install it. The install process for updates to the software is just as easy as for drivers. The software downloads its own update and then prompts you to install it. Before the update could be installed the DriveScanner first had to shutdown. After it finished and started back up, I didn’t notice anything different except the version number.

I did notice that the update installed an icon in my taskbar Quick Launch menu and on my Desktop. It is really annoying when programs don’t ask permission and just start sticking icons everywhere. I like to keep my Desktop and Quick Launch menu very organized and this just causes me extra work. If this happens with every update I am going to get very frustrated and possibly stop using the software.

The biggest problem I see with this program is that it is competing with a lot of free programs, including one that is built into Windows. Windows update also scans for and downloads driver updates. So I decided to see which program does a better job. So how did they do? As you can see from the image below they each found more than one update. Even though they both found updates, only one of the drivers was the same in both programs. Windows update found more updates than DriveScanner did, but DriveScanner found one that Windows update did not. DriveScanner also did not find any updates to Windows, and that is where Windows update is the most useful.

Conclusion

I like the software, but there are some problems that I mentioned above. In addition to the fact that many programs and drivers will automatically update themselves and Windows Update also keeps track of quite a few drivers. If for some reason you don’t like to use Windows update and the drivers you have are not checking for their own updates, then DriveScanner would be a great resource. Otherwise, I am not sure it is really useful. It will become even less useful as more and more programs update themselves.

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