Driver Genius 9

Driver Genius is a handy utility that can scan your computer and make a list of all the drivers, which are small programs tell the computer how to talk to components such as the graphics card or printer.

It can then create a backup copy of all those drivers, allowing you to either reinstall individual drivers or to reload all of them in one go if something goes wrong with the computer.

Some computers come with a restore disc that can reinstall the whole computer, but that will normally wipe it of all your files. We recently had to reinstall Windows on a laptop, a process that was followed by a two-hour hunt for drivers, one at a time. In that situation, Driver Genius is certainly a useful time-saving tool.

In addition to backing up your drivers, the program can also help to keep your PC running smoothly by checking for problems with existing drivers and by downloading any updated drivers that are available online.

The latest version of Driver Genius doesn’t provide many important new features, but it has been updated to be compatible with Windows 7. It also includes a new driver installation wizard that helps to install new drivers on a PC. To be honest, though, we didn’t find that using this part of the program was much easier than simply installing the drivers manually as per usual.

The program can be a little clumsy at times. If you tell it to look for drivers that need to be updated it will scan the computer PC and display a list of the relevant drivers in its main window. But then clicking on any of the other options in that window will cause the program to lose the list of updates, forcing you to scan the PC again.

We wouldn’t describe Driver Genius as an absolutely essential PC utility, simply because re-installing drivers onto a PC often isn’t particularly difficult.

However, it can be quite a tedious chore, so it might well be worth getting a copy of Driver Genius if you don’t already have a collection of required drivers for your computer.