Recovering device drivers is ordeal; free tool offers shortcut

In so doing, I found that many of the drivers I'd needed—such as the AGP controller driver or the drivers for the AMD chipsets—didn't come with the package. I had to download them and then add them one by one and reboot multiple times. All in all, I wasted a good deal of time.

The shareware tool Driver Magician addresses this problem by catalogging all the available device drivers in your PC, backing them up in their original form (complete with installation manifests!), and restoring or reinstalling them as well.

The full version of the tool has these features:

A freeware version of the tool, Driver Magician Lite, lets you back up drivers to a set of folders but not rest

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ore them. However, like the more complete version, it lists full information about all the found drivers, including, most importantly, whether or not they're native to Windows or if they need to be added manually. Even the freeware version proved highly useful, since I could back up all of the AMD-specific drivers in one go and keep them on a CD for safekeeping.

About the author: Serdar Yegulalp is editor of the Windows Power Users Newsletter, which is devoted to hints, tips, tricks, news and goodies for Windows NT, Windows 2000 and Windows XP users and administrators. He has more than 10 years of Windows experience under his belt, and contributes regularly to SearchWinComputing.com and SearchSQLServer.com.

More information on this topic:

• Tip: Save and restore drivers to and from Windows PCs
  
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