Driver Genius was designed with all users in mind,
regardless of their experience with computer hardware and software. It
has a lot of options, but they are user friendly and you can make all
the choices yourself.
Driver Genius Professional Review
Company: Avanquest
Supported OS: Windows XP, 2003 Server, Vista, 7, 2008 Server (Supports all Windows 32 and 64 bit versions)
What It Does:
Driver Genius is an all-in-one device driver manager that searches
for the most up-to-date drivers for your computer. It also allows you
to backup, restore and uninstall drivers.
Installation:
The installation was successful with no issues.
Details:
After starting Driver Genius, if the program is unregistered, the
following screen is shown. If Driver Genius is registered, the “Start
Scan” button appears on the main screen.
Once started, the initial scan of any installed hardware is completed
within less than two minutes. I would imagine that this is about how
long it takes on most other systems, unless there are several dozen
additional, non-local devices attached to the computer.
Once the initial scan is completed, the user is then informed what
out-of-date drivers have been detected on the system. Even though the
device drivers in question aren’t really out of date, we’ll choose to
download them regardless of whether or not they will actually be
installed later.
From here, the user can choose to download the drivers individually
or all at once. Clicking the information link at the bottom titled
“View driver update details” will open a web page for the selected
driver. The page contains various details regarding the driver.
I chose to download both drivers to see what happens. Driver Genius
shows the number of drivers in said packages, along with their status,
download percentage, and file size.
After the download is complete, the user can choose which driver to install at their own perusal.
Once the driver is downloaded and the user installs it, the contents
are automatically extracted. This can take anywhere from around a minute
or two to several minutes. The Intel Chipset Device Software took a
while to extract, however, the installation package was nearly 100MB
in size and covered around a dozen different flavors of the windows
operating system. From start to finish, this is what one should expect
to experience when updating a driver using Driver Genius. Next on the
list is to see all of the options on the left-hand side of the screen.
Selecting “Restore Drivers” shows a screen that lets the user either
choose to restore the drivers from a previous backup, or to browse a
certain location of where the backup might be located.
Choosing the “Update Drivers” option allows a more customized
selection of which drivers to download for each particular operating
system. This would come in quite handy if the user has two or more
installs of Windows that require different drivers from one another.
Selecting the “My Downloads” category simply shows which device driver packages were downloaded and/or installed.
The “Options” menu is designed to change various features of how
Driver Genius operates. These range from compression schemes to
internet connection and download options to scheduling system scans.
Ease Of Use:
Driver Genius was very easy to use, and had minimal effect on system performance, even during peak processing times.
Summary
Driver Genius has a feel to it that’s designed for all users in
mind, regardless of their experience with computer hardware and
software. I also found that Driver Genius seemed to generate a lot less
false positive “out-of-date” detections than Driver Detective. The
reasons for this are varied, but I felt that Driver Genius had a much
smoother feel to it.
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