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Posts with tag drivers

All in one driver solution with DriverMax


Need to reinstall Windows but you misplaced your driver disks? Not sure you have everything you need? DriverMax has you covered. Backing up and reinstalling your drivers couldn't be easier.

After installing DriverMax, go into Driver Operations and click on Export drivers. A list of all your installed drivers will be displayed and you can pick and choose which ones to export, or simply export the whole lot in one go. Once you've reinstalled Windows, go back into Driver Operations, click on Import drivers, and point to the folder containing your saved drivers. The import can take a while, but in comparison to manually installing each driver individually, this is a walk in the park.

DriverMax is also useful even if you don't need to perform a complete reinstall - you can use the program just to make sure that your drivers are up to date or export a list of your installed drivers as an html or text file.

DriverMax is compatible with Windows 2003, XP and Vista and you have to supply your email address in order to receive a registration code.

29% of Windows Vista crashes caused by NVIDIA drivers

Vista crash chart

If you were an early adopter of Windows Vista, there's a pretty good chance you became familiar with one of Vista's coolest new features: an automatic crash reporting utility that will recommend solutions if and when they become available. Or to put it another way, if you tried running Windows Vista on many machines, there was a good chance your computer crashed. A lot. Even if the manufacturer had slapped a shiny new label proclaiming the computer to be "Vista Capable."

There's a class action suit working its way through the courts to determine whether Microsoft changed the definition of "capable" to help Intel sell computers chips. But some of the documents released in the case (PDF link) are interesting in their own right. For example, Microsoft has a chart that lists identified causes of Windows Vista crashes during an unspecified period in 2007.

The folks at Ars Technica took it upon themselves to convert that data into the pretty chart you see above. The number one culprit graphics chip maker NVIDIA, a company that had a difficult time updating its graphics drivers for the new operating system. Next up is Microsoft itself, and really there's no good excuse for that, is there?

DriverView: Super quick list of all the drivers installed on your PC

DriverView
Figuring out if your PC's drivers are all up to date can be a bit of a hassle. You could go into the Windows Device Manager, find the appropriate hardware, select update driver and see if anything new comes up. But it would take forever to do this for every single driver you might want to update.

On the other hand, you could run DriverView, a lightweight executable file that quickly scans your PC and returns a list of every driver and its version number. You can double-click on any driver to bring up more detailed information, save the entire list as a text file, or use the search option to find a specific driver.

DriverView won't download updated drivers for you, but if you want to quickly find out drivers are installed on your computer, this is probably the fastest way. Then you can visit the website for your hardware or software to see if there's a new version of your drivers available.

[via The How-To Geek]

Find out if Linux supports your wireless card

linux wireless searchI know, you rock the Linux and love it, but when you go to CompUSA (horror), it's nigh impossible to tell if the dazzling array of wireless doodads will rock your laptop... Gotta love that driver conundrum, huh? Well search no more. Actually, search more, since there's now a sort of centralized search tool for finding out what wireless cards are compatible with Linux. To say it's exhaustive is to belittle the effort that went into this. It's incredibly thorough. Products are listed by manufacturer, then WLAN type, then product ID, and so on. There are links (when available) to the appropriate drivers, because I can count on one hand the number of manufacturers that ship Linux drivers with their cards. So shop with confidence, and stay away from my unencrypted home network.

[Via digg]

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