Take this for what its worth. Just one person's experience.
I've tried freeware that purports to find updated drivers for you including SlimDrivers, Driver Magician, "Update Checker" that works 'in the cloud' at FileHippo & PC Pitstop's offering. They all suffer from the same problem. They tell me this-or-that device has an update ready, they download it for me and then I go to install it only to have the installer tell me I have a more recent driver already in place.
The only thing I've found that works, tedious as it is, is to open up Device Manager and for every device, select the 'update driver software' option. Because the search time per device is so long, the elapsed time can be several hours. So its one of those things where you set one to run, go browse or do something else and try to remember to look back at it every 15 minutes or so.
I have Dell machines. I do NOT recommend their website driver update. Aside from being terribly slow, it, too, tries to sell you obsolete drivers. In fact, the last time I tried it, on a machine just received from them, I updated the drivers they said needed updating. Then I had them scan again. And lo and behold 1/2 of what I'd just updated appeared on their 'you need to update these drivers' list. Haven't messed with their process since.
EDIT: Probably an obvious thing but if you do update drivers, make sure you make an image before so you have something to fall back on if the update process goes screwy. It can happen. |
