Driver Genius

Driver Genius scans your PC for out-of-date drivers and updates them automatically or on demand. You can schedule scans, back up and restore drivers, monitor hardware, and even boost your system's performance for gameplay.

Pros

Back up and restore: Driver Genius can back up and restore drivers automatically. It's no substitute for a full system backup, but it might be able to restore missing or corrupted drivers without requiring a major system rollback.

Hardware monitoring: The Options dialog's Monitoring tab includes basic but welcome temperature monitoring and alerts for CPU, graphics cards, and hard drives.

Game Booster: The bundled Game Booster can temporarily optimize PC resources for gaming performance and return it to normal settings when you're done.

Cons

Scan only: The trial version of Driver Genius will scan your system and (probably) find out-of-date drivers. But to update them, you must buy the software, so you really can't try out the trial.

False positives: Some of the drivers that Driver Genius flagged for updates were already up-to-date, including our chipset and graphics drivers.

Bottom Line

If the idea of updating your PC drivers manually doesn't appeal, Driver Genius' automatic features and support options are very welcome. However, not being able to try the software first is a real drawback.

Editors' note: This is a review of the trial version of Driver Genius 14.0.0.361.