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Hey guys, just a post here giving a little more info on what I talked about on episode 415 of Hak5.

After installing a fresh copy of your Windows OS of choice, the biggest headache for most of us is the arduous task of trying to locate drivers for all of our different components. So this post is all about making your reinstall a little less troublesome.

Here’s a list of some of the better driver backup utilities!

DriverBackup2 is a lightweight driver-backup tool. The application is portable with a caveat: you’ll need administrative privileges for full use. You can opt to backup one or all of your drivers, the backed up files are dumped into a tree structure based on driver name. DriverBackup2 also allows you to restore and delete unnecessary drivers. If you ever hunted for obscure drivers online, when installing legacy or obscure hardware for instance, DriverBackup2 will save you the hassle of searching them out again.

Double Driver lists all the hardware drivers installed on your system and creates backups of both the actual drivers and lists of the driver names. While handy with any computer, Double Driver really shines if you have a computer that came with pre-installed drivers that are hard if not impossible to come by. With a few clicks you’ll have those archaic laptop drivers backed up and ready to put back to work after a fresh install.

DriverMax allows you to easily reinstall all your Windows drivers. No more searching for rare drivers on discs or on the web or inserting one installation CD after the other. Simply export all your drivers (or just the ones that work ok) to a folder or a compressed file. After reinstalling Windows all drivers can be back in place in less than 5 minutes.

DriverView is a helpful upgrade from looking through devices individually in the Device Manager, but the real value here is in the list generation. Create an HTML-formatted backup list for your future troubleshooting needs or export to text to show friends or forum members just what’s gone wrong.  While it doesn’t actually backup drivers, if you’re still into doing things the old fashion way, DriverView is a great choice!

Now that we’ve got all of the corporate slogans and descriptions out of the way, my personal favorite is the first link we’ve talked about here.  The interface is the least cluttered, and the process really couldn’t be any easier.  For those of you who are looking to deploy driver backups in an automated fashion, there’s a built in commandline builder!  Like I said, I’ve personally used it and really does make life alot easier after a reinstall.

So check it out and if you have any questions, remember: matt@hak5.org – http://revision3.com/forum/  or http://forums.hak5.org

Till Next Week!
Trust Your Technolust