Ever come across the odd system where it seems no matter how hard you try, you can’t find the drivers for the system? Sometimes, it’s due to the fact the hardware is too old or sometimes the company that manufactured the item is no longer in business. Although websites like driverguide.com are extremely helpful sometimes it can be a pain to find the correct driver. A good piece of free software that can help you save time is DriverMax by Innovative Solutions. Although billed as ‘new tool that allows you to download the latest driver updates for your computer’, in my opinion, the best feature of this program is that you can backup drivers currently in a system. Note that this software only backs up drivers currently on a system and does not help search out drivers.

Click the link below to download DriverMax:

http://www.innovative-sol.com/drivermax/

Installation is straightforward. Just follow along the prompts on the screen.

During setup, you will be prompted with the following dialog box. Just click OK to allow DriverMax to index the drivers.

A pretty little window tells you that DriverMax is indexing the drivers on your system.

Once it’s completed, click ‘Finish’ to launch DriverMax

The first window will prompt you to sign up for a free registration code. I’d suggest you read up the blog post on ‘Disposable Email Address’ to register. http://www.hardwareproblems.com/software-solutions/disposable-email-address.html. I’ve chosen just to ‘Continue evaluation’.

So we’re finally at the start page for the program. You can look over the other interesting features of the program but for this post I’m just showing off the driver backup feature of the program.

Move the mouse pointer over ‘Driver operations’ to view the options. Click ‘Export drivers’.

This opens the ‘Export Drivers wizard’. Click ‘Next’.

Once the system has found all the drivers (76 total in my case), you’ll notice that it also includes all the default Windows drivers which should not be required to backup as they are already on the Windows CD. So to limit the search, click the ‘Settings’ button to the lower right.

This will bring up the following ‘Display settings’ window. Uncheck ‘Show Windows drivers’.

This should bring the number of drivers down to a more manageable number (15 total in my case, down from 76). Click ‘Select all’ and then ‘Next’.

*Note that in some cases you may come across a driver that can’t be backed up. Unfortunately, you’re on your own in this case.

Select the folder you want to backup the drivers to and click ‘Next’. If you need the files to be compressed to a smaller size, select to export the drivers to a zip file’.

You’ll be presented with a window showing the progress of the driver files being backed up.

Once it’s completed, click ‘close’.

So once completed, backup the driver backup folder or zip file to your choice of medium (USB flash drive, CD, etc). Make sure to back up a copy of the DriverMax program as well.

The process of recovering the drivers is quite simple. Once you’ve reloaded the operating system, you’ll need to reinstall DriverMax. Once you’ve completed the setup, it’s just a matter of selecting ‘Import drivers’ from ‘Driver operations’.

You are presented with the ‘Import Drivers Wizard’. Just click ‘Next’

Select the location and type of driver backup (folder or zip)

The next window is particularly of note. You can choose which drivers you wish to reinstall. This is extremely useful if you’ve changed hardware since you did your last driver backup as you do not want to install a driver that the system no longer requires. Just click ‘Next’ and once the files are imported back into the system, reboot the system once prompted. That’s it.

In conclusion, this is a great little free program. The only real limitation is that it’s unable to backup programs associated with hardware often included with sound cards and video cards.