Should I use third-party driver updaters?

A driver, also known as a device driver, is a crucial computer program that establishes a communication bridge between hardware devices and the operating system, such as Windows. This ensures proper recognition and functionality of the hardware on your PC.

Do driver updaters apps are safe to use? Most of the third-party driver updaters are not viruses or malicious software, but it’s common that anti-virus programs (such as Malwarebytes, ESET, Dr.Web) detect these tools as a PUP (Potentially Unwanted Program). Therefore, in order to use it, you might need to temporarily disable your anti-virus protection. You can use VirusTotal.com to check for viruses just to be sure. Ruin your PC: You should beware that using third-party automated driver updaters, in rare cases, can cause serious issues to your PC (even if the driver has passed WHQL testing), it is not recommended using them unless you are a computer novice, or you are very short on time. Moreover, make sure to create a system restore point and backup your private data before using it and review each driver manually before updating (sometimes they are not accurate, offering you a driver from a different manufacturer, for example, an Asus driver was offered as an upgrade to an Intel device).

Don’t get paranoid about driver updates, you probably won’t need them! It will not improve the performance of your system or stability (the only drivers that you should update frequently are for graphics cards, sound cards, and LAN's). If you're not experiencing any issues with faulty or broken drivers, or unrecognized devices, it's best to avoid updating your drivers. In many cases, driver updates only provide support for new hardware, and probably driver-updaters may not be able to recognize this. Please take a moment to relax and avoid becoming too obsessive about it!

There is no “Best Driver Updater”. We really don’t know how reliable driver updaters are. We tested about ten apps and each one gave us a different result after scanning. You should be aware that there are scam apps that just show you fake driver updates and issues or use other tricky tactics such as scaring you with bad words like "crashes" or "blue screens", to try convincing you to make a purchase.

Anyway, you can be sure that the driver’s updaters that are listed on our website are real, genuine, and reliable (This does not necessarily mean that the other driver updaters solutions are unreliable). Also, make sure not to be attracted and influenced by the name or brand, as we have evaluated driver updaters from reputable software brands and found that they performed poorly.

It's better to use an in-house driver update program from computer/laptop manufacturers or to do it manually by looking up for each driver individually on a device manufacturer’s website. It is more time-consuming, we know, but it's better that way. Even when manually updating your drivers, you still get help from these tools to just identify available updates, to make your manual updating process a little faster.

In conclusion. The most effective tools for updating drivers are likely the Windows built-in "Device Manager," which allows you to automatically search for drivers online for each device (To do it, simply open device manager by typing "devmgmt.msc" on the "Run" dialog box, right-click on the device you want to check, then click on "Update Driver"), and "Windows Update", which got a significant improvement with its automatic driver detection in recent years. In most cases, these tools will cover all your driver update needs, with only rare exceptions where they may fall short.