Back Up Those Drivers!

Back that thing up

You're messing around with a tweaking program or just deleting some files you thought were unimportant and then BAM. You've made a specific change that affects one of your hardware drivers. It's been known to happen. But here's where you feel really foolish, you've lost the CD with the appropriate drivers so you have to search the net.

You might find it, or you might not, but with Driver Genius Pro, you can save yourself this hassle if you just back up what you already have. Let's see if Driver Genius stands up to Softpedia's review process.

What's Inside

On the install, I chose to go with the full options which included the NVIDIA driver tweak and the system info tool to get the full feel of the product.

The interface is very straightforward and easy to follow. It's a dual window pane with an explorer like view of your drivers on the left and a description of them on the right. If you don't like this view, you can go straight into a 'Wizard' mode that takes you through any specified 'restore' or 'backup' mode. If you thought the normal interface was easy, the Wizard will be a walk in the park.

I liked Driver Genius' option of using the antivirus software on my machine to immediately scan for viruses after it backs up any driver. I think this is definitely an easy and practical tool to have, by ensuring virus free backups, you don't have to worry about going online and downloading potentially dangerous and harmful drivers.

You can backup your drivers into the default setting (which backs them up in typical folders) or you can back them up in other formats as well. If you want to save some space, you can back it up in ZIP format or into an auto-installing or self extracting .EXE format.

Another useful function is the "Live Update". This is a quick and easy way to see which drivers that you have installed on your system need updating. Driver Genius logs onto its very own drivers information database and gives you the latest details of potential updates. From there you can click on your 'Update' button and it will give you the latest necessary drivers that you might not have on your machine.

All-in-all, Driver Genius does what it says it can do. I didn't really run into any problems with the interface or the actual backup/restore. This program's got over 30,000 hardware records and my computer was built of hardware that was within its parameters. The things that bugged me a little though were the limitations that were set on the trial version (it only restores the display adapters driver and network adapters driver among other things).

The Good

Driver Genius has a very easy interface and an even easier to follow Wizard. It has 30,000 hardware records with available updates for a lot of your driver needs. It'll save you time and effort if you take the time to backup your existing drivers. Supports Windows 98/ME/2000/XP/2003.

The Bad

I wish it offered more in the trial version, but I can understand that it wants to actually see a profit. I can't really say for sure how everything reacts if I can't test out all the aspects.

The Truth

This is a nifty little tool to have in your inventory. It'll definitely save you time when you have to go find those drivers, it'll also save you some hassles of making sure that they're clean. Give Driver Genius a chance, but don't expect too much in the trial version since it can't offer all of its more useful services, just most of them.

Check out some screenshots below.