DriverControl

DriverControl is a simple software tool that lists all your installed drivers and lets you view their properties in order to perform updates. It also gives you the possibility to configure a couple of driver settings. However, it doesn't implement options for updating the drivers.

As long as you have .NET Framework installed, you don't need to set up anything else. This means that you can save the program's executable file in a custom location on the disk, or on a USB flash drive, and double-click it to launch the application. It doesn't make any changes to the Windows registry configuration.

All installed drivers are listed at startup, so you can expand their categories to view details. These include the device name, driver version and date, and manufacturer. More information can be looked up on Google.

When it comes to driver settings, you can view the driver key and modify its value. For instance, this can be the driver version, matching device ID, driver date, or provider name.

The tool gets minimized to the system tray to become non-intrusive, so it doesn't interrupt your regular activity on the computer. As we expected, it didn't put a strain on the system's performance in our tests, thanks to the fact that it needed a low CPU and RAM to work properly. It didn't hang or crash.

On the other hand, it showed an error dialog on a couple of occasions when we attempted to configure driver settings. We must also take into account that DriverControl is still a work in progress. Sadly, the developer seems to have stopped its development, and it's not built to actually look for driver updates.