And if it does, you can easily restore them.
There are also a number of settings you can change, including setting a schedule to perform scans and also setting exclusion lists if there is a certain driver you specifically don’t want updated.
Final Thoughts
I’m always dubious when you see software advertised that checks your driver dates and updates them if they are out-of-date. After all, you don’t know what you are actually downloading!
However, Raxco is a name that I trust, so I figured I would give it a go.
Although I have to be honest I was still expecting it not to perform as advertised, just because of previous experiences of this sort of software.
So, before I installed it I asked a few questions of Raxco:
Q: Do you link to the companies websites for the drivers?
A: They are not pulled from the websites. There is a researcher that finds drivers and updates a database.
Q: So you just download the drivers from the companies websites?
A: Not all the latest drivers are listed on the main pages of the driver vendor’s site. We have a specialized team that keep a close eye on every release. So the drivers we recommend are always safe to install.
So with that in mind I thought I would try it on my main PC. This PC is a Windows 7 box, 64-bit, and as far as I knew was mostly up to date, given I had only built it a few months before.
So I have to say I was very surprised when PerfectUpdater informed me that I had 20 drivers out-of-date. Ok, to be fair, most of them were related to the same type of component on the motherboard, but 20 was a lot.
So I figured what the hell and had the software update everything – again figuring something might break. But no, it all worked perfectly and I am very happy!
The software was very easy to use, and I really liked that you could backup and even restore your drivers, in case there was a problem.
One thing I would have liked to have seen would have been a little bit more information on the drivers themselves, other than just the date of driver. Maybe a link to the companies website, just so I know what it is and who makes it, but that’s just me.
The cost is $29.99 and there is also a free trial you can download. The $29.99 buys you a 365 day licence, so basically you can use it to check your drivers for a year.
You could argue that $29.99 is a lot to pay just to get drivers that are freely available, and that is true, however I updated all 20 drivers in a matter of minutes, where as it would have taken me several hours to go and check each driver on each website and then download each one and update, so if you want to be up-to-date, but you don’t want to spend the time doing it manually then this is for you.
There is also a household licence version of PerfectUpdater so that you can install on all machines in your house, so that everyone is up-to-date, all for an extra $20.
Dang. Bought this a couple of days ago, but got the single license option and not the household option. Don’t know how I missed that. Gonna have to send an email to see if there is an option to upgrade.
Came up with 29 driver updates for my XPSOne which aren’t even tracked on the Dell website. Worked well for me.
Also like the driver backup/restore in case something goes wrong.
I have found that new drivers don’t necessarily mean better performance. If I am not experiencing any problems, I have a tendency to leave them alone. Just my way of doing things, same for my BIOS.
I do agree Tony, but sometimes when you have drivers showing as a few years old it is time to update – and there is the driver backup feature here which made me feel safe to update.