Drivers are one of those computer areas you should always try to stay on top of. Keeping them updated is important, just like defragging your hard drive every month, but the reality is it’s easy to let such issues slip.

Driver Genius 10 aims to make driver renewal a snap by providing an automated system for finding and updating those little files which drive your devices, so never again will the latest 3D shooter be subject to corrupt textures or tearing because you’ve forgotten to ensure your graphics card drivers are bang up to date.

The program is a simple and slimline affair, with a main menu which consists of a big scan button, and a ‘check for updates’ button.

Driver Genius maintains an extensive database of the most current drivers for all common hardware, and it updates this over the net upon installation.

You can then click scan, and within ten seconds a full report will be returned of how many drivers are on the computer, and how many of them are out of date.

The list of outdated drivers can then be browsed, allowing you to decide which ones to update, or you can leave them all ticked and download the lot.

Driver Genius doesn’t deal with beta versions; it’s only officially stamped driver files that it recognises.

Once you set it downloading, you can leave the program going in the background as it runs through grabbing each file, using the fastest and most local server it can find to retrieve them.

After the driver packages have been downloaded, another click sets the installation of each separate driver running.

The program automatically offers to set up a system restore point with each installation, which is a wise precaution in case anything should go wrong.

Incidentally, the user can back up all current drivers using the program’s restoration menu, which duplicates every single driver with a choice of storage methods including ZIP file or self-extracting EXE. Should any mishaps occur, you’re pretty well covered, in theory anyway.

Fortunately, in our test run of the program, no big issues reared their heads, but some minor points did. One of the 23 outdated drivers which the program uncovered was our sound card.

With the new driver downloaded, we clicked to install it and the Realtek package launched itself, informing us that it would now uninstall the existing driver and require a reboot; then we would have to run it again to install the fresh driver.

We did so, but when we rebooted and re-ran the program, Driver Genius told us that the new driver had already been installed.

Of course, we knew it hadn’t, although Windows had installed a default HD sound card driver on reboot itself.

Anyway, we ran the Realtek installer again, which put the proper driver in place, but a computing novice might have been confused by what went on here.

Similarly, when it came to updating our graphics card driver, Driver Genius just launched the Nvidia package.

There was no mention or warning that you should really uninstall your existing graphics card driver before you install a new one, or you’re probably storing up trouble for the future, which again isn’t too novice-friendly.

However, these were the only two issues we came across in terms of driver installation, and otherwise the program worked well in terms of finding newer drivers for other bits and bobs, such as our ethernet and hard drive controllers, along with various Intel chipset drivers.

Despite the odd hiccup, and some slight strangeness such as the help option not functioning, the program is easy to use anyway and pretty much self-explanatory.

There aren’t many options available, or indeed needed, but one useful new feature is a driver scan scheduler, which can be used to further automate the process of keeping your drivers regularly up to date.

Source:http://www.itreviews.co.uk/software/s952.htm