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Backup XP drivers for painless reformats

Ever decided to format a run-down windows machine, only to find that after hours of backing up personal files and reinstalling; you’re missing driver CDs, the original manufacturer of your sound-card no longer provides drivers, and after following 17 “download now!” links through a website promising to have your drivers, you’ve ended up on a russian website about vodka and loose women?

For the impatient

Check out Double Driver, a nifty little freeware application that will search the system for all installed drivers and back them up for you.

Convenience

If you’re dealing with a laptop, sometimes just finding out what hardware you have can be insanely difficult. If you know what hardware you have, sourcing drivers is annoying at best. If you have all the original driver CDs, you probably could think of a few better things to do with your time that sit there swapping CDs and watching the system reboot numerous times.

Double Driver’s restore function will let you restore all your drivers in one click, so you’ll only need to reboot once to get all devices drivers working after a reformat.

Experiences

I used Double Driver and a USB stick to help me reformat a work laptop that was being re-purposed into a home laptop for a client. After reinstalling windows XP there were 7 devices listed in system devices as driverless, including ethernet and wireless drivers (try searching for drivers on the internet without those!).

After restoring drivers with Double Driver onto the Dell Latitude D620, no devices showed up with the yellow question mark, however I found that the Intel Wireless Connectivity software hadn’t been moved across (which could be expected as it is additional software and not technically a driver), and peculiarly the Intel GMA video card drivers didn’t seem to work, so I had to suffer a non-widescreen resolution until I could source them off the Dell website.

All in all however, definitely a program I will be using in the future when inevitably, yet another Windows box will call out in desperate need of some reformatting loving.