


Any vagaries in the installation are the same as if you'd downloaded the drivers manually, from their respective sites. The update process was more long-winded, with each of the drivers downloaded separately from the Driver Genius server and then installed on request, from the program's management screen.Įach driver is installed from its normal installation package, so the AMD video driver originally came from AMD and the chipset driver came from nVidia.

The scan took around 30 seconds, an improvement over the last iteration of the software we reviewed and one of the claims Avanquest makes for version 14. We hadn't noticed any problems with these components, but some of the drivers were over a year out of date. It spotted five drivers that needed attention, including those for the graphics adaptor, sound chip and ethernet adaptor.

We ran Driver Genius 14 Professional on our test PC. Although most information is shown as text, this is easy enough to understand and it's simply a question of selecting the drivers the program flags up as needing updates. The control screen is simply and logically set out, with a simple menu down the left-hand side and status reports and controls in the corresponding panel on the right. Although this is large, there's still a chance that drivers for more obscure hardware may be missed and not be flagged up for attention. Keeping them up to date is a continuing task, as new updates are regularly released to take advantage of new features, or to correct bugs and other problems.ĭriver Genius 14 Professional aims to take most of the pain out of the update process, by automatically scanning your system and downloading updates from its own database of over 100,000 drivers. Without a driver you wouldn't be able to print pages, listen to music or watch videos. These small programs sit between the operating system and pieces of hardware, enabling the two to communicate. A surprising number of problems on a Windows PC can be traced back to drivers.
