Driver Magician Lite Portable

CNET Editors' review

by: CNET staff on February 29, 2012

Driver Magician Lite backs up your system's drivers to a folder you select. If you need to reinstall your operating system or just need a driver, you can get them from the program's archive. Driver Magician Lite is a freeware version of Driver Magician. The free tool backs up drivers but doesn't restore them automatically. But you can still access the archived drivers manually, which is what most users will need anyway. Driver Magician Lite Portable is a totally portable version of the freeware edition. It does everything Driver Magician Lite does, but it runs from any directory without an installer, so you can save it to a USB drive and run it on any PC. Saving a backup of your drivers to a single archive means you won't have to mess with disks (or worse, diskettes) when installing or reinstalling hardware or software.

Driver Magician Lite is a small, simple tool. It scanned our PC and listed all our computer's drivers by Description, Class, Version, Date, and Provider its main window. Non-Microsoft drivers are shown in red, and Microsoft system drivers are shown in black. Since Windows automatically installs its own drivers when you install or reinstall your operating system, there's no need to back up Microsoft drivers, though there's no reason not to. Each driver has a checkbox to select it for backup, and there's also a Select All button. The only other controls are Start Backup, About, and Upgrade. We clicked Select All and then manually deselected the Microsoft drivers. Next we clicked Start Backup and selected a destination for Driver Magician Lite's backup folder. The program finished the backup quickly, finishing with a success message on the interface. When we opened the backup folder, all our drivers had been saved to folders named for their device. These contained not only backups of the various drivers but also associated files, including Security Catalogs.

The full version of Driver Magician can also update and remove drivers, and it offers more extras. But the free version is a sensible tool to have around, especially in its portable incarnation.

 

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