Keep your Windows drivers up-to-date with Driver Booster

One of Windows’ biggest deficiencies compared to other operating systems is having to manually update your installed software, which gets even more complicated when it comes to keeping your system drivers up to date. Although there are certain tools to automate this task, Driver Booster is one of the best in its field: a free program that automatically detects and installs updates to your computer’s drivers with the added bonus of 5 major new functions in its latest edition.

Its biggest advantage over similar tools like Sumo is that it updates the drivers directly without having to manually access an external URL. The process is as simple as installing the tool, starting it, and then in a few seconds you’ll get a list of all your out-of-date items, marked by level of urgency according to the date of the latest update.

You can specify which updates you want to install, and ignore the ones that don’t interest you. That done, you just have to tick the ‘Update now’ button in the upper part of the screen and wait, keeping in mind that you may need to restart your computer to apply the changes and continue with the process (you’ll be notified beforehand when this is the case).

The biggest limitation on the free version is the limit on the driver download speed, meaning if you have a lot of software to update, the process can get quite long. Luckily, the tool can run perfectly well in the background, which together with the option of setting Windows to auto-restart means you can leave the program to do its stuff for a few days until everything is done. Also, after each update a restore point will be created on the system in case you have any problems and want to reverse the changes.

Driver Booster is completely free and includes no adware or anything of the sort (although according to our VirusTotal report some antiviruses might send up a flag or two; for our part, we haven’t found anything ‘malicious’). During the install process it asked if we wanted to optionally install other tools from the IOBit family, with the box for that purpose unticked by default. This is good form, with a respectable use of advertising, in this time of sharks swimming all over the software world. You can also download the Pro version with a commercial license, which will considerably increase the download speed and add certain extra features.

Driver Booster – 6-month full licenses

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