Monday, February 24, 2014

Updating Device Drivers on outdated Windows hardware

If you have laptop or desktop that is more than a few years old, it is likely that the hardware manufacturer (like most hardware manufacturers) never bothered updating the device drivers for your system to support newer operating systems such as Windows 8 or Windows 8.1.

Therefore, if you ever go to the hardware manufacturer's website and look for newer device drivers you are completely out of luck!

What is even worse is that many of the device drivers that were written for an older OS such as Windows 7 will either not work at all or cause Windows system compatibility problems which can spell bad news for the stability of your Windows system and OS.

So what can you do in this situation?

Fortunately, there is a 3rd party software vendor that has an answer to this big dilemma and that company produces a product called Driver Genius (http://www.driver-soft.com/index.html)

UPDATE: Raxco Software (the makers of PerfectDisk) has a similar product called PerfectUpdater which operates on a yearly subscription model (http://download.raxco.com/perfectupdater?utm_campaign=perfectupdater&utm_source=hs_email&utm_medium=email&utm_content=12164660&_hsenc=p2ANqtz-_GWU4uLtWGM_xjdY6JBSDldpnfEMtR6--Dhib1V-qbkgBDje0nzXycA_aPictRdn2VldTAwY5pPFgwgms6sGYbJ_mJcA&_hsmi=12164660)

Once you download and install this software on your computer, it will allow you to scan your entire system for all missing or out-of-date device drivers and then connect to all of the various device driver repositories to search for new and updated device drivers for your existing system hardware!

How cool is that!

In my tests with using Driver Genius, Driver Genius was able to detect all of my missing device drivers (that I could tell by reviewing my hardware manufacturer's website for downloadable device drivers) and install the most recent available device drivers from each of the respective manufacturer's websites (AMD, Intel etc.).

While Driver Genius may certainly not solve ALL of your pesky device driver problems, it certainly helps with many of those critical hard-to-find device drivers that keep your system up and running properly such as the Chipset device drivers, Video device drivers etc.  It certainly helped me and saved me a lot of time from digging around the Internet to find the most appropriate device drivers for my system!!


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