9:26 AM
Paul B
Have you ever had a piece of non plug and play hardware and had to search online for a driver? Sure, we all have right? Now, have you ever had to search online for a driver where the company went out of business, or the product got discontinued? Perhaps not all of us had to do this, but quite a few of us have.
Wouldn't it be nice if you could take the drivers from a different computer with the same device already installed? Sure it would, the problem is trying to wade around through all of the DLL, SYS and INF files on your computer making sure you have everything you need.
This is no longer a problem. I found a FREE program that will backup your device drivers for any hardware installed on your system to a folder. You can then run the update driver wizard from device manager on the new system and point the hardware to the folder you backed up your drivers too. It really is easy as 1-2-3. This software is called DriverMax!
The following taken from The How-To Geek (howtogeek.com):
Launch DriverMax after installation, and you'll be presented with this graphically pleasing screen where you can select the "Export drivers" option.
You'll have to hit the next button to get to the list of drivers. This should show you all drivers installed on your system.
You can select just the particular driver you are trying to transfer, or you can use Select all if you wanted to backup your entire driver list (useful).
Use the next button again and you'll be taken to a screen where you can choose how to backup the drivers. If you are trying to move the drivers between machines you should choose the option to export to a folder.
Use the next button again and everything is done. You'll be able to directly open the folder using the "Open extraction folder" button.
In here you should see the folders containing the actual driver files. This is what you'll want to copy to the other computer using a thumb drive.
On the other computer, you can choose to update the drivers for the problem device, and when you are prompted on how you want to search, just choose to "Browse my computer for driver software" and then pick the folder with your exported drivers.
These instructions are fairly generic, but I've found the basic principles to be very handy.
If you want to try out DriverMax, all you have to do is click here: (DriverMax)
