Featured Freeware: Driver Magician Lite

Driver Magician Lite lacks frills and showmanship, but the simple layout makes backing up your device drivers much easier than pulling a rabbit out of a hat.

A quick install and the small memory footprint would lead you to hope that the rest of the program runs the same way. That's no sleight-of-hand: backing up every driver on my computer, from Bluetooth and tablet controllers to Intel chipsets, took less than 5 minutes. Users can select drivers individually or hit the Select All button at the bottom of the spreadsheet-style layout. Hitting the Start Backup button opens a directory window, so you can choose where the drivers will be saved to, and then another click begins the process.

We recommend creating a designated folder for backing up your drivers, since Driver Magician natively mimics your computer's folder tree and saves each driver to an appropriate folder. This, I found out the hard way, was easier than cleaning up the mess after saving them to my desktop--it was worse than trying to pick up a deck of cards splayed across a stage. The app doesn't do updating or reinstallation, unfortunately.