A device driver is a piece of software that tells the operating system (Windows XP, Windows Vista, etc) how to communicate with a piece of hardware. For example, Windows XP is installed on different hardware depending on whether the computer is made by HP, Dell, Sony, etc and so in order for Windows to work with all of the hardware, it needs a piece of software that tells it what commands it can give and what kind of responses it will receive back. It is very important to continually update your device drivers because sometimes the instructions are not clearly defined or the operating system does not recognize them and that’s when you end up with the blue screen of death or computer crashes.

And it’s also a good idea to have a backup of all of your drivers just in case you have to reformat your computer or because you don’t have your original restore CD that came with your OS. Also, if you’ve updated many of the drivers after you bought your computer, you don’t want to have to revert back to the drivers on the original CD anyway because they are old!

At first I was going to write a post about how you can update your drivers by yourself, but for those people who do not want to go and download lots of drivers or don’t understand how to do it, there is software that can automatically backup and update your device drivers. First I’ll mention a free software that backups your drivers and allows you to restore them, but unfortunately does not have an update feature. The automatic update feature is only in the paid applications.

DriverMax for Windows Vista and Windows XP is a free program (you will have to register though otherwise you get a splash screen, but registration is free) that takes care of making sure you drivers are backed up. It’s a small piece of software and backs up drivers fairly quickly. It found all of my drivers and even ones I didn’t know I had, so I felt confident that it got everything.

Click Export Drivers and the program will first find all of your drivers and give you a list that you can review. My list was quite long and I checked it to make sure it had found everything and it did!

Click the Select All button and click Next. Choose a location for your driver file and then save this file somewhere off your computer. You can choose to create folders for each driver or create a zip file. The process takes a little while because of the large number of drivers, but it gives you a progress bar. The file was only about 20MB, 40MB uncompressed.

There are also some software apps that backup, restore and automatically update your drivers. These might be worth the small $30 to $40 fee since updating the drivers is the most important aspect to maintaining a smooth running computer.

Here are some of the sites:

1. Driver Magician - Only $30 and it has a built in database of drivers that is updated through an Internet connection. Nice feature is that you can create an .exe file of your drivers, so that you can re-install them without having to install Driver Magician.

2. My Drivers - Does about the same thing, but is $39. Has over 58,000 drivers in database. Also backups some other useful stuff like Outlook, Outlook Express, and your IE Favorites. It also has a driver compatibility test before it installs a driver, thus reducing the risk of computer failure after a driver update.

These two seem to be the best at the current moment and definitely will give you more options than Driver Max for a small price!