Tech N Life » drivers

Support Sunday: PC Check Up Time!! Free With My-Config

Konrad Walsh-(admin) — Sun, 24 Jan 2010 22:09:52 +0000

I have come across a site that does free PC checkups for you on your drivers. Now, ordinarily, I say stay a million gigabytes away from these sites but this one came recommended to me. So I have had a nosey around.

Its a site called My Config but for a reason I can’t figure out, its domain is called ma-config.com???

Anyway, you need something like this to get inside your PC and check that the drivers and hardware are all getting along and there is no bullying in the yard when your back is turned. Here is a step by step guide to re-gaining control over the school yard.. ahem, I mean PC.. My-Config gives you an enormous amount of system information.

Head to Ma-Config.com

And click here:

Now you are required to install a plugin. If you are using Internet Explorer, then you can choose Automatic Install.

However, most of my readers are Firefox users, so this bit is for you. You click Manual install and run the .EXE file. When thats installed, refreshed the browser page.

After a short delay, you will get your summary page:

As you can see you have a general overview and on the left you have very specific drill down options.

I chose graphics card here and you can clearly see the download related drivers button on each page:

After you click the green button, you are taken to a list of hardware which makes things slightly confusing but just scroll down and you will see the appropriate driver stand out like in the next screen shot. I also displayed the properties window of my current graphics card driver so you can see if it was correct. And yes, it was right on the mark.

Simply click download and you will be brought the devices manufacturers website or where ever the driver is held. Just follow the prompts from there.

Anyway, get yourself over to My Config.

If you don’t like the idea of submitting to a website, try my earlier recommendation for Device Doctor.

Driver Magician Free For Today – Giveaway

Konrad Walsh-(admin) — Tue, 05 Jan 2010 10:54:49 +0000

I have mentioned Driver Magician before on this blog. I use it a lot in order to identify unknown hardware and also to backup my currently installed drivers. Its a good piece of software to have on a USB key and when you friends need you to come to the rescue.

GOTD are giving this away for free today. Grab it whilst you can, as you only have 20 hours left.

Driver Magician offers a professional solution for device drivers backup, restoration, update and removal in Windows operating system. It identifies all the hardware in the system, extracts their associated drivers from the hard disk and backs them up to a location of your choice. Then when you format and reinstall/upgrade your operating system, you can restore all the “saved” drivers just as if you had the original driver diskettes in your hands. After one system reboot, your PC will be loaded and running with the required hardware drivers.

Key features

Back up device drivers of your computer in four modes.
Restore device drivers from backup in one mouse click.
Update device drivers of your PC to improve system performance and stability.
Uninstall device drivers
Live Update device identifier database and driver update database.
Detect unknown devices.
Get detailed information of the hardware drivers.
Clone all drivers to an auto-setup package (.EXE), so you can restore drivers without installing Driver Magician.

Download here – GOTD

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Support Sunday: Keep Your Drivers Up To Date Easily With Device Doctor

Konrad Walsh-(admin) — Sun, 29 Nov 2009 00:00:26 +0000

Do you constantly worry that your device drivers are out of date? Oh wait….that’s just me as a system admin, I worry and check my devices constantly. Network cards, SCSI cards and much much more. Now using a little freeware application called Device Doctor, I can update drivers a little more efficiently and for free. We should probably start off with what a device driver is and when you need to load drivers. Drivers are needed for every piece of hardware on your computer from your monitor to your mouse back to your printer. The device needs the driver to tell it how to interact with the operating system – no drivers means that your hardware is not going to work as expected, if at all. When you reformat your computer system, you need to reinstall your drivers but sometimes you cannot find the proper driver and then sadly you will not be able to get your hardware to function. What do you do? Well Device Doctor can also identify and download the proper driver for unidentified items. Let’s take a look at the application, how it works and how it can help you update drivers for free. First run the installer and it will do its thing:

Click through and let it install. When it completes, the application will launch automatically. The user interface looks like this:

Go ahead and click Begin Scan to let it scan your device’s drivers.

Once the scan is completed you will be presented with a full list of devices that need updating. But wait! There is more - the application actually provides download links to grab the drivers that need updating. They really take all the leg work out of this for you. If a device is unidentified the application can still grab data from the card and check for drivers online. This is super helpful when you do not know where to look for the correct drivers. This can help you to not have to open the case and pop the card out looking for the fcc id or another identifying piece of information.

When you click download update it will take you to a webpage. That page will contain information as well as the link to grab the driver.

If the driver does not work out for you, please click the link to report the incorrect driver and then the next person will not have the same issue as you. This feature alone makes this much better than just Googling for the driver. I have used other applications like Double Driver in the past but it did not do much for downloading drivers for unknown devices and then I found Zhangduo that does find drivers for unidentified devices but not for known ones. You will see a statement warning you to backup, create a restore point and instructions for doing so. Good looking out Device Driver Guys! Click the download driver installer link in the center of the page to initiate the download. That will start the download like so:

Run the installer and update your drivers. It is that simple!

When my driver was updated, my mouse moves smoother! Sweet. It is easy to run this on a system to see where you stand. Now I will preach a little bit about how important keeping your drivers up to date are. Today in my network we upgraded a switch to giga bit speeds from 10/100. One of our servers refused to connect at giga bit speeds. What did we have to do? We had to update the NIC drivers and then all of our problems were gone. If I had done this before it would not have been an issue and the upgrade would have been complete. Instead it took another 20 minutes of my life and down time! So kids keep your drivers updated! When you don’t know what drivers you need, this can wind up being a MUST HAVE application! This story appeared first on MakeUseOf

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