DriverMax is a free Windows driver updating program which does it right. There are a few of these services out there, but this is the first I’ve come across which combines online and offline support with such effectiveness.

The idea is you download the software to run a scan of your machine, after which you can choose to update any old drivers found on your system. The clever part is the fact that the service uses crowdsourced driver files from the user community to keep things up to scratch. If your peers have a newer driver on their system, the database gets updated and the file is sucked up to the central file repository to be available to everyone else.

Better still, every user can add comments to a particular driver to warn of possible conflicts and installation issues. It’s a great way to take the power of the community and fold it into a crucial bit of IT maintenance.

The free program comes with all the usual bells and whistles, like scheduled update checks, installation rollback and system configuration reports, but for more sophisticated features (like the ability to download more than 2 drivers a day) you’ll need to upgrade to the commercial Pro version (e.g. £19.47 for the annual license version). It’s a nice package done well and with style, and extremely useful.

The one caveat is to be careful when upgrading generic drivers onto an OEM computer which may have a custom configuration, but the install rollback feature of the software should take care of things if something goes wrong.

  DriverMax is a new tool that allows you to download the latest driver updates for your computer. No more searching for rare drivers on discs or on the web or inserting one installation CD after the other. Just create a free account, log in, and start downloading the updates that you need. You can also export all your current drivers (or just the ones that work ok) to a folder or a compressed file. After reinstalling Windows you will have everything in one place!