They promise to help and optimise your PC, but are driver update programs actually worth it?
Underneath all of the cooling fans, heat sinks, capacitors and within the microchips and storage media of your PC lies the software that you use every day. Powering all of this and telling all of the components of your system how to run together are drivers. These special software packages are the instructions that make your system’s hardware work. From the mouse and keyboard, to the graphics card and motherboard, all of this hardware needs drivers in order to function. Without them, you wouldn’t have a PC capable of doing much.
Keeping your drivers in good order and up to date is one of the most important aspects of maintaining a PC. If you don’t do it, your system will be at a disadvantage and, in some instances, could even become unstable and prone to errors. Therefore, most users will make it an important routine to check for updated drivers and update them when necessary.
Doing this can be essential, especially if you want to get the most out of your hardware. Graphics card drivers are one of the most updated pieces of PC hardware, with updated drivers often bringing in increased performance and additional functionality. Such updates are far from unique, though, and there are various other bits of hardware that may need attention.
For some, however, this constant need to check and update hardware can be a chore. Others simply forget to upgrade and end up with an out-of-date system. This fact has not gone unnoticed by some software developers, and there are now many different applications promising to help in these situations.
These driver update programs claim to optimise your system and take the hassle out of upgrading by automatically scanning your system and upgrading it for you. They should tell you exactly what components are out of date and do the legwork, leaving you free to worry about other, more important things. Sounds good, right? Of course it does, but sadly, this is often far from the reality.
Driver Danger
Most will be familiar with registry cleaners. These tools, of which there are plenty, advertise their ability to scan your system’s registry in order to locate and repair errors. They claim to speed up your PC, make it more stable, and generally do good things but on some occasions, registry cleaners have been known to cause more harm than any good they could provide. Programs have become unusable, hardware has stopped working and in some cases, PCs even refuse to boot.
These problems aren’t necessarily down to unscrupulous developers wishing to cause people problems; although many such applications are little more than scaremongering money makers, some are genuinely created to try and help people. The problem comes with the nigh-on infinite combinations of specifications of PCs out there. Everyone’s system is different, be it hardware, software, or installed applications – and you’d be very hard pushed to find two that are identical outside of a corporate, cloned-PC setup. Because of this, programs that can make changes to a PC in order to improve its performance have got it hard. A change on one PC that actually produces a beneficial effect could end up causing quite the opposite on another.
The exact same can be said for driver managers. Although much more specific than system cleaning tools that have to identify far more objects and configurations, driver managers still have to scan a system for content and come up with upgrade paths. Turn this into an automated decision process and you’ve got a recipe for potential problems. Just as registry entries can cause programs and even the OS to stop working, so too can drivers and having the incorrect drivers installed or others missing can lead to all sorts of problems. Problems a casual home user with limited technical knowledge may see as being far bigger than they actually are. This leads to more money being spent on fixes and assistance, in some cases this can come from the supplier of the actual driver software, creating a rather cheap and immoral business practice.
Now, this isn’t all that common and most driver update apps are not so devious, but there are other reasons why using them is not advised, including general security.
As with many other programs that you’ll find available online, driver update apps can often come with baggage. That is, unwanted extra applications that get installed at the same time, sometimes without your knowledge. Others may even contain malware. This may seem a little paranoid, but it’s been found to be the case by many users.
Often, driver update applications fall into that group of software that relies on somewhat false advertising and scaremongering tactics to get you to use them, by persuading you your PC is out of date or under-performing. Such tools often come at a cost, and are offered after a ‘free’ scan along with promises that they’ll provide a boost in speed, make your hardware work harder, and generally help you have a better life. For the most part, it’s lies.
In actual fact, most driver update programs won’t do anything you can’t do yourself very easily. Even if you have no technical knowledge – a user group these apps prey on – you can upgrade your PC without having to risk installing any extra software. To put it simply: you just don’t need any help, Windows, you and your system have it covered.
These programs will also bombard you with falsehoods: claim you have outdated drivers when you don’t, and at times even make up results. We’ve seen software state a system has got drivers dated years prior to when it was even manufactured, and despite us knowing it had shipped with far more recent versions. Again, this preys on users who simply know no better.
We mentioned cost before, and that’s the big picture here. Vendors of driver update programs will usually only care about the bottom line – and that’s a subscription. After the initial scan of your PC, which will always find problems, even on a perfectly up to date PC (yes, we’ve tried it, many times), you’ll be told you have problems and to fix them you need to subscribe to a yearly service. The cost varies but is always unnecessary. Don’t fall for it.
Too many of these pieces of software are just scams, pure and simple. Instead, take matters into your own hands and save yourself money and any potential risk of security concerns.
Auto Update?
Windows, in its various forms, has always been on hand to help users stay up to date, and the latest iterations have improved upon this even more. Windows has its very own update system and will stay up to date perfectly well on its own. Not only that, but the OS can even download and install some hardware drivers automatically if you wish it to.
One of the most updated drivers in a system is the graphics card. Manufacturers like Nvidia and ATI are constantly tweaking and refining their drivers to get the most out of the hardware and many users, especially gamers, prefer to stay up to date. Doing this is very easy, and requires no help. The hardware vendor sites have latest driver links on their respective front pages in highly visible locations and the upgrades are simple installations. There’s no technical trickery these days, as there may have been in the past, and upgrading is not hard. Certainly not troublesome enough to warrant a yearly subscription and specialised tools. The same can be said about audio cards, the drivers for which are found easily on supplier sites.
Likewise, drivers for your system, such as the motherboard chipset, network controller, USB functions and other (often confusing) aspects, are usually found easily on the PC supplier website. Like other drivers, these rarely require anything more than a simple installation. Dell, for example, one of the biggest PC manufacturers around, makes all drivers easily accessible in a handy drill-down listing. There’s even the option to auto-detect your PC, after which the site will take you to the support for your specific model.
In The Dark
What do you do if your system or hardware has no such option? What if you don’t know what your graphics card or PC model is, or there’s no easily found official support?
In situations likes this, it’s easy to see why some people do fall for the driver update application allure. With little technical knowledge, it’s easy to find yourself duped and this is why driver update tools are so successful (they wouldn’t be around if they weren’t). Even in this situation, though, it’s best to avoid such software. As we’ve said, driver updates programs often don’t accurately detect any problems and they’re not always known to achieve good results. In many cases, it’d actually be better off to stay with older drivers.
If you need to upgrade, though, get someone you know and trust to look at your PC for you. If you don’t know anyone proficient with PCs, have a look online at one of the many IT forums. A simple Google search will often yield results for groups of people who are willing to help for free and you can easily check up on a site’s reputation beforehand. You can always write to Micro Mart too, of course.
If you’d rather not ask strangers online for help, you can find out information yourself easily enough. Don’t worry, there’s no need to crack open your PC, all you need is the right tool. CPU-Z (www.cpuid.com) is a great little tool that’ll scan your PC and list the make, model and other details about the most important parts of your system, including GPU, motherboard, CPU, memory and more. With this, you can easily search online for the correct drivers.
White Knights
A question remains. Are there any legitimate driver update tools? Yes, there are some and there are even free options. Driver Doctor (devicedoctor.com) is a free program that’s been used by a lot of people and even recommended by critics and Raxco’s PerfectUpdater (www.raxco.com) is often reviewed well by others even if it is a paid-for package. By all reports, these and others do actually offer good performance in terms of keeping your PC up to date and ensuring you have the correct drivers.
If you really want to automate your PC’s drivers so you don’t need to worry about it yourself, there are avenues to explore, but even then, we’d advise users think about it. The manual method of updating a PC is by far the best in our opinion and it takes any potential for software error out of the equation. You’ll know exactly what you’re installing onto your system and you’ll have full control at all times. No matter how good the driver update package is, even if it’s legitimate, you can’t claim the same here. If something goes wrong when you’ve performed the upgrade, you’ll know what you did and can reverse it. The same can’t always be said for an automated process.
As always, the key is to just be careful, regardless of the route you take and to always research any new software package, especially one that manipulates your PC at the system level. Exercise this care and you’ll be fine.
Do You Even Need To Upgrade?
All this talk about driver update programs and the manual updating of drivers may lead you to wonder what the point of it all is.
It’s perfectly reasonable to ask such a question as, for many, there’s very little need to update drivers in the first place. Contrary to the claims driver update programs make, there are few, if any, reasons to update a working system – and even when there may be a need, it’ll not likely cause system instability if you don’t. Sure, upgrading to a new OS may well require some driver updates to prevent any problems, but for the most part, it’s all up to the user.
For example, someone who plays a lot of games will have their system set up as they like, running the best possible combination of drivers to get the best out of their games. Unless a new game or piece of hardware comes into play that requires new drivers, why rock the boat? Sometimes, new GPU drivers can even cause problems, so updating can have a negative effect.
The simple truth here is that old cliché, if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it. As cheesy as this may be, it’s also very true.
Driver Downloads
Knowing what drivers you need and finding them are two different things. One area where driver update apps try to get you is by claiming they have a huge database of drivers, so can find any needed software easily. This becomes increasingly more attractive if you struggle to find such a driver yourself. If your PC has lesser-known hardware installed, you may find it difficult to locate the required drivers online and be left struggling. There are sites that can help, though.
A great example of this is www.driverguide.com. This is a large site that puts a searchable database of drivers at your disposal. All you need is a device model or number and you should be able to find and download the driver you need. It’s free to use, and – most importantly – it’s very effective.