All of us have at one time or the other re-installed Windows and found out that driver required to run that one piece of hardware is not available by default in windows. And of course, if you’re like me, you wouldn’t even have the drivers CD that came with the hardware !
So, what did you do the last time you were faced with such a situation ?
Well, I’ll tell you what I did. I spent hours and hours on the Internet scouring various websites to find drivers that would work with my setup. I downloaded a lot of them, installed a couple and gave up when none of them worked. And then I repeated the same process again the next morning. I did eventually find what I was looking for, but I can tell you this, it really wasn’t the best use of my time.
That is about to change, though, because I think I’ve finally found a solution for this very problem. The next time I go about re-installing windows on my PC, I’ll make sure I take a backup of all the device drivers present on the system using Double Driver.
Double Driver is a free and utility which not only lets you view all the installed drivers on your system, it also lets you take a back up of all the drivers and, this is my best part, lets you restore from the backup whenever you want to.
When you first install and launch Double Driver, you’ll be presented with a blank window. Clicking the Scan button will make Double Driver scan your computer and list out all the drivers it finds.
By default, Double Driver will select all the Non Microsoft drivers that it finds, presuming that the Microsoft ones will already be present on the Windows installation CD and if you do a reinstall, those MS drivers will be installed automatically.
You can, of course, choose to select all of the drivers. To create a backup, just click on the backup button in the toolbar. It really is that simple.
Double Driver will create a backup of all the selected drivers in a folder based hierarchy, as a single zipped folder or a single self extracting executable. I find the self extracting executable the easiest format to handle, since I don’t have to install any additional software on my system to get back the drivers.
The backup file that Double Driver creates is portable and you can copy it to a secondary media for safe keeping.
When it comes to restore, the process couldn’t have been simpler. Just click the Restore button, point Double Driver to the backup that you created and click Restore. If you created a self extracting executable or a zipped folder backup, then extract the files first to a temporary folder and then point Double Driver to that folder.
Wasn’t that easy ? Now, with Double Driver, you really won’t have an excuse the next time you reinstall Windows and your sound card stops working because you lost the drivers CD that came with it.
Programmer, blogger and a geek making a living shifting bits around the Internet. Sharninder is the owner of Geeky Ninja
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Thanks for sharing.. i got backup :)