How to Find and Update Outdated Drivers in Windows

   Information

First of all, I want to give the credit to my friend Northernsoul55 who made me aware about this useful tool, NirSoft Driverview.

   Information

Driver update. Sometimes it is a big question to us. We are sometimes confused about which driver is outdated in my system, which one is to update, and how to know all about it. Sometimes we use third party programs to update our drivers, but in most of the cases those dont work perfectly.

Here we are going to use a tiny program, NirSoft DriverView. It can make our job easy upto a great extent.

Here's how:

Part I

Finding outdated Drivers

1. Download DriverView from any of the following locations:

• Manufacturer's site: DriverView: Loaded Windows Drivers List
• MajorGeeks: Download DriverView - MajorGeeksGet it as per your system, 32 bit or 64 bit.

Get it as per your system specification, 32 bit or 64 bit.

2. Unzip the download. It will contain these files:

Double click the .exe (Application, marked in the image above) to start driverview. Make the window full screen.

3. Now you can see a long list of drivers. Look at the "Company" tab. You can see that most of your drivers are provided by Microsoft corporation. Those drivers are obtained via windows updates. Our objective is to find the third party drivers to update them manually.

Go to "view", and then Check the option "Hide Microsoft Drivers" there.

Now you are seeing the third party drivers only.



4. The appearance at this stage may make you confused, but dont worry. Overlook the first few columns say ...

• Address
• End Address
• Size
• Local Count
• Index

Our point of concentration will be the next few columns. Say:

• File Type: The type of the driver
• Description: Details about the driver
• Version: The file version that is installed
• Company: Developer/Manufacturer of the driver
• Product Name: Almost same to Description above
• Modified Date: The date of creation of the driver. Version date. It is most important to us.
• Created Date: The date of installation of the driver.

Now we have to make our strategy.



5. Making our update strategy. Some things we need to overlook. These are:

• The drivers with Filetype: "Unknown": No action is required.
• The Drivers with Company "Macrovision": No Action is needed.
• The Drivers With Company "Brother Industries": No action is needed.

So out list is even shorter now.

6. For the remaining ones .... concentrate on the "Modified Date" Column. If this date is old, there is a scope of update. Let us have an example:

You can see that the sound driver and network Driver is outdated. So those needs to be updated.

Part II

Attempt to Update

7. Now, you need to go the the driver Developer's site. For the Realtek Network Driver, as per the above example, go to Realtek. Get the driver that is appropriate for your system.

For a ready reference of the drivers, you may visit to Driver Reference Table (DRT), by usasma.



8. After downloading the driver, you need to install it. The installation depends on the type of the driver.

• If it is .exe download, run the application file. The driver will be installed automatically.
• It it is a zip download, Driver Install - Device Manager

That's all.

Related Tutorials

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• Driver - Installing and Updating in Windows 7
• How to Install a Driver in "Add Hardware" Wizard
• How to Install a Driver in Add Printer Wizard
• How to Install a Driver in Device Manager
• Driver selection for your Hardware devices
• How to Uninstall Drivers in Windows 7 and Windows 8