Keeping drivers up to date?

[Jon Lawrance]

How do you do it? How do I know what needs updating?

Are there any utilities that I can run to check for what needs updating and where to get the updates from?

Jon

[fishybawb]

Someone posted a link to a program that would try to hunt down the latest drivers for your hardware automatically ages ago, but I can't find the thread now. The old fashioned way to do it is just periodically go to your hardware manufacturers' websites. If you don't know what hardware you've got, use Everest:

http://www.lavalys.com/products/over...ng=en&pageid=1

That'll give you links to the manufacturer's homepage too.

You don't really need to update your drivers if your system's working fine, although a lot of people do it anyway. Sometimes newer drivers add fixes and/or features.

[zepper]

If I can, I try to wait at least a month to add any updates or patches to let others catch the arrows. But I do eventually perform most updates to programs and firmwares.
. Case in point: I updated my Combo drive's firmware yesterday and it solved a problem I was having with copying .ISOs from a burned DVD.
. As was noted above, there are several different softwares out there that attempt to do this for the most popular softwares and several mobo mfrs include a utility that you can run to keep their drivers/BIOS/Utilities up to date - MSI is one...
.bh.