In computer terms, the word 'driver' only comes about when you're installing a new piece of hardware. However, these small programs that allow Windows to talk to hardware are vital and without them your printer, graphics card or TV tuner simply wouldn't work.

Driver Genius Pro 2006 is a rare piece of software, designed specifically to look after the drivers installed on a computer. It finds all hardware attached to the PC, determines the drivers (and versions) and lists them in a main window with the opportunity to back them up.

So, what’s the point of a program that backs up just drivers when there are so many applications that will archive all the files on a computer? Well, if you come to reinstall the software on a computer because of a failed hard disk, or you're installing the same drivers on a number of different PCs, it can be a real time saver.

The program can back up all the drivers into a single executable file, too, so they can all be reinstalled in a single job. Trust us, this is very handy.

Driver Genius Pro 2006 also takes care of driver updates. Driver-Soft claims to hold a database of some 30,000 drivers, so most can be updated straight from its site. However, when we looked at updating the drivers the program recommended on our test PC, six of the seven sources were from MyDrivers.com, Driver-Soft’s Chinese site. Unless you read Chinese, it’s pretty difficult to navigate.

This leaves just one remaining source; DriversWizard.com, which can be slow to download from. Plus, the accompanying documentation is poorly written.

Driver Genius Pro 2006 also includes a separate utility to tweak most Nvidia graphics card drivers and a system information tool which gives more information about the hardware in your PC than Microsoft’s System Information tool (Start > Run > Type: msinfo32 to see this).

So, although Driver Genius Pro 2006 is essentially a backup tool, it's very thorough and doesn’t ask a king’s ransom for the privilege. If you've got a compulsion for computer tinkering, this £15 application could save you a lot of anguish.

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