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A first look at Driver Booster 2

Never change a running system, that's an answer that you get quite often when you ask tech-savvy users if you should upgrade software running on a computer.

This is especially the case for drivers, and here in particular system drivers. Should you update drivers of the Serial ATA Controller or PCI Express Chipset, or better keep them as is and avoid any issues that may occur after updating those drivers?

There is no definitive answer to that. While it may make sense to keep the status quo, your system may sometimes benefit from updated drivers, for instance by improving performance, compatibility or features that the new driver added to it.

While it is certainly possible to search for drivers manually, it requires that you know which devices are installed on your system and where to look for drivers for these devices.

Driver Booster 2 is a new version of the driver management software that automates the process as much as possible.

driver booster 2

The process of scanning devices for driver updates has been automated as much as possible. The program will scan the devices on start by default -- something that you can disable in the options -- and displays all outdated drivers that it identified afterwards.

These drivers are further divided into device drivers and game drivers which you can switch between easily. Each driver is displayed with its name, date of the installed driver and date the most recent driver has been released.

In addition, a driver category, status and option to display details or update the driver is displayed here as well.

You can simply hit the update button to download the most recent driver and install it on the system, or check out the details first to make sure that Driver Booster 2 has identified it correctly.

The program creates a System Restore point automatically prior to any driver installation so that you can restore it at a later point in time if things did not work out.

The settings offer several interesting options. Here you can add devices to the ignore list so that they are not included in the program's driver update scan anymore. Another interesting option is the ability to drop the WHQL test requirement which may provide you with newer drivers that have not been submitted to Microsoft for WHQL testing.

Drivers are installed silently in the background for the most part. You may still experience screen flashes or slow downs while updates get installed. One of the new features of Driver Booster 2 is that it tries to minimize these when you are working in full screen mode.

Conclusion

The free version of Driver Booster 2 is an easy to use program that does a lot of things right. It detected outdated drivers properly on a test system and installed them with minimal user interaction.

It is ideal for users with little to no technical background, as it handles all the hard lifting for them. That does not mean that experienced users won't benefit from it as well.

If your have not updated drivers in a while, you may use it just to see if new drivers are available. There is however no option to research the driver right from the interface to find out more about it before it is installed.

This article was first seen on ComTek's "TekBits" Technology News

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