The Driver Guide Web site offers thousands of user-submitted, hard-to-find drivers.

Driver Guide
www.driverguide.com
Rating: 9
Special feature: Thousands of drivers for older devices

This free site requires registration, but sign-up is easy (name, email address, ZIP code, and country only). During sign-up, ignore the survey and the free offers if you don't want the site sending you email.

Driver Guide is unusual in that it lets you submit drivers, which it then stores on its servers and makes available to other users. We would be skeptical of this practice were it not that Driver Guide also lets you search manufacturer Web sites for drivers (click the Manufacturer tab to find the link). If nothing turns up, you can try your luck with the user-submitted drivers. The user-submitted files include unofficial or user-tweaked drivers that often work better than the manufacturer's drivers, especially with older systems.

The site has 100,000 drivers that it updates daily and an extensive search engine with three query levels: simple, basic, and advanced (advanced has the most search criteria). The site also offers a search wizard that turns up not only the drivers that match your criteria, but also the most popular drivers in that category.

Finally, if you cannot find the driver you need, Driver Guide lets you request a driver at no charge. Staff and site members will do their best to help you, but if they find the requested driver is readily available, they will not reply to your query.

Drivers Headquarters
www.drivershq.com
Rating: 9
Special feature: Software that scans your computer and makes driver update recommendations

Drivers Headquarters' Driver Detective scans your PC and makes recommendations about drivers that need updating.

Drivers Headquarters' driver-update feature is not free (which is why we did not give it a 10), but it offers an excellent driver evaluation service that is. At no charge, you can test your PC using the site's Driver Detective utility (click Try It Today from the home page). Driver Detective scans your PC and returns a list of devices and drivers. If Driver Detective finds drivers newer than the ones you are using, it marks your current drivers Bad; if they are the most current versions, it marks them Good.

To download an updated driver (direct from the manufacturer's Web site), you must join Drivers Headquarters ($29.95 includes a free download of Driver Detective, a lifetime membership, and a money-back guarantee). Once you become a member, you can download only the driver for a problematic device or you can take your chances and update all outdated drivers on your system. Drivers Headquarters updates its database of more than 30,000 devices continuously, and Dell and Gateway also refer their customers to the site, so Drivers Headquarters must be doing something right.

If you don't want to join the site, you can still run your PC through Driver Detective. In seconds the program identifies the manufacturers of all your PC's devices and tells you whether or not the device drivers are current. On our test PC, which was experiencing minor video card and scanner problems, Driver Detective identified outdated video and scanner drivers, in addition to numerous other old drivers. Overall, Driver Detective asserted that 47% of the drivers on our acceptably functioning system were "wrong."

Driver Magic
www.drivermagic.co.nz
Rating: 9
Special feature: Request Driver feature for subscribers

Driver Magic's device information report includes links to additional information regarding the drivers it recommends.

This subscription site ($23.99 per year) offers a 30-day free trial and a 90-day money-back guarantee. It also offers driver identification software. After registration and a short download, the Driver Magic software scans your PC and returns a list of all devices and the driver it determines is best.

The Driver Magic site doesn't make recommendations about which drivers need an update. Additionally, it does not evaluate the drivers installed on your PC, so your system's current drivers could be newer than the ones Driver Magic recommends. Compare your current drivers with Driver Magic's suggestions before updating.

Nevertheless, this software is a great way to get an overall system snapshot of devices and drivers. Additionally, you can save the device details report as a Web file (noted by the .HTM file extension), and take it to a different computer for analysis. This feature is extremely handy if your problematic PC cannot access the Internet.

You can also use Driver Magic's search engine, which offers myriad criteria, to search the site's driver database. If you cannot find the driver you need, use the Request Driver feature (not available with the free trial) and the site's staff attempts to find a driver for you. (The company claims a 95% success rate in finding requested drivers.)

WinDriver's active forums are good resources if you like to interact with other people.

WinDrivers
www.windrivers.com
Rating: 8
Special feature: Active, free support forum; more than 28,000 members

This site frustrated us because, unlike Drivers Headquarters or Driver Magic, we had to subscribe as a member before it would release any driver information to us. Fortunately, the WinDrivers site does offer a 24-hour pass for $4.95 per day, so you can locate a needed update (or evaluate the site) on the cheap before you spend $29.95 for a yearly subscription.

The cool aspects of this site are that, in addition to driver updates, WinDrivers also offers members information about antivirus and BIOS (Basic Input/Output System) updates, assists members with locating DLLs (dynamic-link libraries), and helps you pinpoint hard drive and network hardware requirements. The site also has a very active members-only message board. The forum area is a good resource because you can receive technical assistance from knowledgeable users or discuss with others the ins and outs of using unsupported drivers.

In our tests, Drivers Planet offered outdated drivers for devices.

The Bad

These sites have something to offer at least one segment of the computing public. However, their drawbacks prevent them from being standouts.

Drivers Planet
driversplanet.com
Rating: 6

We like the look of this free site, which links directly to a device manufacturer's Web site for updates and offers driver and BIOS updates, as well. When you search for a driver, it returns a well-organized chart with details on possible driver candidates. However, we found that many of the links to drivers were outdated when we visited the site. If Drivers Planet updates its links more frequently, it could be a standout Web site.

DriverSearch.com
www.driversearch.com
Rating: 4

This is a driver search engine, pure and simple. No fancy criteria (you can search by keyword and category only); no helpful articles; no ID wizards. If you want a no-frills site that can locate driver information on the Web, this is it.

Driverzone.com's active, free forum is its main advantage.

Driverzone.com
www.driverzone.com
Rating: 6

Driverzone.com's archive of drivers is small and out-of-date. Every search we performed returned a driver for Windows 95/NT (users of these OSes, take note). Although there are some newer drivers in the database, this site does lack the comprehensiveness of our standouts.

What saves Driverzone.com is its active bulletin board (forum), which has more than 13,000 registered members. The site's staff and knowledgeable users review the posts, so someone will try to help you. Driverzone.com's archive of old drivers and its forum make the site a good candidate for people looking for outdated drivers.


The Ugly

Two of these sites are extremely limited and the other is downright unscrupulous. We recommend you avoid them.

Driver Forum
www.driverforum.com
Rating: 2

Driver Forum is just that, a forum that lets you exchange information and drivers with others. There are no drivers or links posted on the site itself. It's a nice idea, but none of the posts we read had replies, so the site was a waste of time.

Mister Driver
www.mrdriver.com
Rating: -1

We've given this site a negative rating because most of the drivers on the site are for Linux users, and when we entered the forums area, it was empty. But that is not what turned us off. As soon as we entered the site, it bombarded us with pop-up ads. When we tried to perform a search, the Mister Driver site tried to download a browser plug-in (we politely declined). Even worse, the site later attempted to install the notorious Gator spyware program, which collects information about you and provides it to Internet advertisers. We suggest you avoid this site like the latest virus.

PC Drivers
www.pcdrivers.com
Rating: 2

With more than 1,000 device drivers and updates, many of which were outdated, and no search feature (you can browse but not search), this site is of little value to anyone. Enough said.


Driving Your Future

Over time, as the signed (Microsoft-approved) driver concept takes hold, you may need to look no further than the Windows Update Web site for your drivers. In the meantime, however, and as long as you are running devices that are older than your PC, these driver sites will be an invaluable resource. Bookmark your favorites so they will be easy to find the next time you experience driver difficulties.

by Jennifer Farwell

Take Precautions Before you install a driver, make sure you can undo the installation if the driver causes more problems than it fixes. Windows 98/Me users will need a copy of the existing driver(s). If you do not have one, right-click the My Computer icon on your Desktop and select Properties. Click the Device Manager tab and click the device in question. Expand the category if necessary by clicking the plus sign (+) next to the device. Click the Driver tab and click Driver File Details. Write down the location and name of all driver files and copy them to a floppy diskette before you replace them. If you later need to restore the old driver(s), refer to the "Replace It Properly" sidebar in this article for assistance. Windows XP users will not need driver files thanks to the new Driver Rollback feature. Right-click My Computer on your Desktop, click Manage, and click Device Manager in the left pane. Locate your device and double-click it. Click the Driver tab and click the Roll Back Driver button. WinXP will restore the previous driver and you can begin your search again.

Update When It Makes Sense Some driver Web sites recommend that you update your drivers regularly. Newer drivers often expand functionality, so updating your drivers has a benefit. However, the old saying, "If it ain't broke, don't fix it," applies to computing. A fancy new driver can cause problems with a functional configuration as easily as an older driver can. Conventional wisdom says the following: 1.. If a device quits working or crashes your PC even though you have changed nothing, reinstall the existing driver. 2. If you are installing an older device on a new system, or if you have made changes to your system and a device is acting up, look for an updated driver. 3.. If your device has never worked well or at all with the default driver (especially if the device and PC are of different vintage), experiment with old and new drivers to find the best one.

Find The Right Resource If you are seeking an update (rather than an older replacement driver) for a newer device, and a driver site recommends a driver with a date that is more than three months old, there may be a more recent driver available. Double-check the manufacturer's Web site for the most recent driver updates. You can also check the Windows Update site (www.microsoft.com /windowsupdate), which is a good resource for signed (Microsoft-approved) drivers. However, some proprietary devices (especially those in notebook computers) do not perform well with the Windows drivers Microsoft often uses. If you need a driver for an older system or device, your best bet is to check one of the driver resource sites that offer older drivers (only a few do). Few manufacturers update drivers for devices released under older versions of Windows or for products they have discontinued.

Replace It Properly If you are updating rather than installing a driver, use the Windows Update Driver feature to ensure the new driver replaces the old one. Open Device Manager (in Windows 98/Me right-click the My Computer icon on your Desktop, click Properties, and click Device Manager; in Windows XP right-click the My Computer icon, click Manage, and select Device Manager), right-click the problematic device, and click Properties. Click the Driver tab, click the Update Driver button, and follow the prompts. If the device still causes problems, delete it and then reinstall it, providing the new driver at installation. To delete the device, open Device Manager, select the device, and click the Remove button (Win98/Me) or select Uninstall from the Action menu (WinXP). Restart your PC and provide the new driver when Windows reinstalls the device.