My Drivers or DriverMax

I have a hopefully relatively easy question to ask about these programs please.

Have I clearly understood that these programs will save the existing HW drivers that are installed on an o/s?

I appreciate that there appears to be functionality to download newer ones from the net but for now I would rather leave that option to one side.

So example. I have a Dell laptop to which I do not have the required drivers. I have been dreading doing a re-install simply because prior to doing so, I have to spend so much time on the Dell website trying to figure out and find the correct drivers that are needed.

Now lets say that I am happy with the drivers which are currently installed on the laptop will either of these utilities back those drivers up by way of saving them from the existing install. Have I understood this correctly please?

Final question, what kind of drivers will this save, presumably:

1. sound, vga, ethernet both wired/wifi?

2. will it save the chipset drivers as well?

Any thoughts on which is more user friendly of these two progs.

Many thanks for any info provided.

Cheers

 

Cheers DavidGP.

I agree with you that going direct to the manufacturer's site is the best option but the Dell site can sometimes be awkward and slow.

Let me ask you a couple of final questions please.

1. Do you remember if this prog actually identifies the version number of the driver(s) it saves.

2. Once (say) DriverMax saves a particular driver(s) that is/are installed, do you need to use Drivermax to re-install the driver or can this process be done manually ie independent of Drivermax, if you see what I mean.

Cheers

 

Ok Cheers DavidGP.

I will install it in my test system and give it a twirl.

Noted.

Many thanks

 

Well I gave DriverMax v5.8 a test. I merely installed it and asked it to save some drivers.

I did not try to restore any of the saved drivers but if it does so reliably, I can see the use of such a prog.

The useful things that this prog does:

1. it gave the drivers and version all in one location.
2. it provided info as to which drivers were installed by default by the o/s and which were manually added (which would make hunting for the missing drivers an easier task, if one were to go to the manufacturer's site to download them manually).
3. it may even come in useful for uninstalling HW.

I think that the .exe route from manufacturer's website is the best solution as you said DavidGP.

However, I will keep this in mind for possible use myself or when friends ask me how to re-install without having original disks or restore partitions and this prog seems ideal.

As I said I have a Dell laptop on which I will try this out and see.

As regards restoring drivers saved by Drivermax, I would not use DriverMax but rather would opt for manual install since it creates relevant .inf files.

Cheers