How often do you update the drivers for the computer/notebook? I did a Google search of this and found out 2 interesting things about it;

1. Users prefer not to update their drivers and the main reason is they are vary of issues that might happen once the new drivers are installed.

2. Users think of driver update the same way as Windows Update, in fact; I saw couple of forum comments mentioning about windows update can break system since M$ releases unstable stuff, so you have to wait.

Pretty much this seems to be the mindset for a lot of folks. Well, I’m a strong believer of update everything when an update is available. So I use for most purpose an aggregate updater service for my software/hardware.

I use Windows Update regularly.

I use 3rd party software upgrade aggregator like the one ‘filehippo.com’ provides. Also use the ‘Secunia PSI’ software – the use of this helps me in 2 ways. If there are instability in the programs, that is why the update is appearing in the first place (for example, take the adobe reader update to patch the vulnerability which was hot couple of weeks back. Secunia PSI helps identify outdated/old program files and helps us derive a score of the machine and helps finding out a download link for the updated software as well.

Now, when it comes to hardware drivers, I do the same thing. Had evaluated a lot of auto updaters/aggregators but seems most of them are paid versions (this is one area where there is not much choice), else it’d be requiring a lot of registration and uploading of your current drivers to that the database can be build (which I guess is good).

Recently I found out something good in this front too and from 2 days of evaluation, it looks like I’m going to keep it.

Slimdrivers

It is called SlimDrivers, tried it on both my home PC and laptop, it detected most of the drivers and above all, without any mistakes! My laptop is a standard Thinkpad T series and I have the nVidia Quadro NVS 140M. It is a pain to find an updated drivers for this from nVidia’s site itself, and filehippo.com updater makes mistake when it detects this too, after download – you may not be able to install it. However this time, with SlimDrivers; it was a breeze. It is still in beta and I hope they keep it free for ever. Try this out, it is cool.

They do have computer cleaner as well (pretty similar to CCleaner, looks almost the same).