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Best Driver Updater


joshkmartinez

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Driver Updates can damage your system at the point where a reinstall of Windows will be needed.

  • Drivers are "middlemen" between your OS (Windows) and your hardware (computer). They control and facilitate the interaction between Windows and hardware components, to deliver a "message", nothing more;
  • Having all of your drivers up to date, all the time, will not improve the performance of your system, nor your computer. You cannot increase the hardware performance of a component over the current capabilities it have;
  • Driver updates are released to fix a bug or an issue with a previous release of that driver. Not everyone with the same drivers will experience the issue, so if you are having no problems with the drivers you are running, you don't need to update them. "If it's not broken, don't fix it";
  • You can download drivers for free from your computer/laptop manufacturers website, or from the hardware component manufacturers website. You don't need to pay for any of them, if you are being asked to pay for drivers it is likely a scam;
  • Only drivers from the computer/laptop manufacturers website, or the hardware component manufacturers website are considered official (legitimate and working). You should not download drivers from anywhere else;
  • Driver Updaters are a scam, they try to convince you that you need these programs in order to make your system perform well, which is false;
  • It has been tested and proven that these programs will detect outdated drivers on a system that have the most updated drivers from the manufacturer, which shows that they don't work and/or they try to make you install "newer" suspicious drivers;
  • The goal of the distributors of such programs is to make money by making you buy their useless product, or install additional software (PUPs) when you install their program. Your system will perform worse with these programs installed than without;


This being said, such programs could be seen as "pure scam" and should be avoided at all cost.

Here's some articles that talks about Driver Updater programs and why they shouldn't be used:

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Junk Software to fill a niche that really needs no filling.  That is unless there are specific requirements at-hand.  In that case you go straight to the vendor and/or manufacturer.

                                                              snakeoil.gif.1fad7e15b4faa40122562d99ecc52f63.gif

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I generally do update my drivers, however I do so manually via the specific hardware component manufacturer's website when possible (some drivers are only available from the system manufacturer as they're only provided to the OEMs for systems).  I tried a supposedly highly rated/reputable driver updater and it ended up breaking my system pretty badly with the drivers it installed so I ended up having to roll back my system to get it working properly again.  Accurately identifying hardware components as well as the latest available driver for those components is a tedious task which is why I don't trust any software to automatically do so for me.

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  • 1 year later...

Please refer to the information here as well as here.

You can also take a look at the search results for the term "Driver Updater" in Malwarebytes blog and threat database here.

Most driver updating programs are classified as PUP (Potentially Unwanted Programs) by Malwarebytes so this is the wrong forum to promote them on.  The same goes for registry cleaners, system performance optimizers and other such tools.

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5 minutes ago, exile360 said:

Please refer to the information here as well as here.

You can also take a look at the search results for the term "Driver Updater" in Malwarebytes blog and threat database here.

Most driver updating programs are classified as PUP (Potentially Unwanted Programs) by Malwarebytes so this is the wrong forum to promote them on.  The same goes for registry cleaners, system performance optimizers and other such tools. 

Then I think you should have shut the thread down in the very beginning and told this guy @joshkmartinez he is not allowed to bring up questions regarding so called PUP. He could not to suffer a string of hard and exclusive preaches.

 

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Just lock this thread, please, there's not even a point at all to make it open, as there would only be one vocie accepted "I do not use a updater and I suggest you never use it as well, as they may bring TREMENDOUS disasters to your PC, all of them download fault software for you and are full of ads and malwares." Am I right?

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This thread was created over a year ago and no one had replied to it since June of last year so that's likely why the Admins and Mods left it alone because they didn't expect anyone to do a web search for forum threads related to driver updaters to come here and promote their products by resurrecting a long dead topic, but now they probably will lock it to prevent it from happening again.

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By the way, in case you're curious as to why, on a technical level, driver updaters do not work, it is because hardware vendors like Intel, AMD etc. will frequently use the same hardware ID (the ID info read from Device Manager that driver updaters scan from the registry to determine what hardware is installed to find a matching ID in their databases to provide the appropriate driver for the associated hardware) across multiple devices, even when a completely different driver/driver package applies to that particular device.  That's because the hardware ID is not what hardware vendors actually use to identify specific hardware.  Instead, they use the proprietary hardware model numbers, which often can only be known by physically reading it from the label on the piece of hardware itself (i.e. not within software/Windows or even the system BIOS) or by checking the system manufacturer's website (assuming they actually provide that level of detail on the individual components installed in a system they make; some do, some don't).

It is because of this that driver updating programs so frequently fail to recommend the appropriate driver for many components and even Intel's own driver updating utility will fail to identify components that they themselves have manufactured (I've found this to be true across multiple systems where I've run the utility where it had multiple Intel components installed, yet still had to search for and download drivers for certain components manually because their own tool failed to identify them).

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One more thing, there are also OEM specific custom builds of hardware devices out there that use their own drivers due to differences in functionality compared to the retail/generic versions of the same hardware.  One example is discussed here and there's a more broad discussion on the subject here, however I've seen many examples over the years in different systems, and since such systems tend to be the most common (i.e. branded OEM systems made by major PC brands/manufacturers vs custom machines built using off the shelf standard parts) it is quite often the case that you end up with hardware that shares many similarities to the generic off the shelf version of a particular device but may include specific functionality, tuning or additional (or removed) components that may require specific driver builds from that particular OEM/system builder.

As an example, I used to be a PC repair tech and I had to keep folders full of custom/OEM Dell, HP, Compaq, Gateway and other makes of drivers for specific hardware like sound cards, TV tuner cards, graphics cards, chipsets/motherboards, USB hubs, network cards (both wired/ethernet as well as wireless) just because these special versions of hardware were out there.

When you install the generic driver for such a component, at best it works OK (though perhaps with some level of lost custom functionality which may or may not have a large impact) and at worst you end up with a system that crashes (BSOD) whenever Windows boots and tries to load that generic driver for that custom/OEM component.

Although such things aren't quite as common these days as they once were, with the prominence of mobile devices with more laptops and tablets being sold than ever, custom builds with drivers designed to provide longer battery life are not uncommon and using the generic off the shelf driver can sometimes result in a loss of battery up-time.

It would be nice if drivers could be so generic that a scanning utility could easily point you to the right driver, but even Windows Update has been known to often download the wrong drivers for hardware and if Microsoft can't get it right, I doubt any of these smaller vendors making these driver updater utilities can either.  That's why the safest thing to do is get drivers for your specific system from the manufacturer's specific driver support page for that system unless you know for certain that it isn't some custom hardware component in which case you can get more up to date drivers from the hardware vendor's website directly (AMD/ATI, Creative, Intel, NVIDIA, Realtek etc.) but even then might lose some level of functionality like lower power/better battery performance if the OEM driver was tuned differently to prioritize that.

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