DriverMax 4.0 with downloadable driver updates for Vista

Innovative Solutions

07 June 2008 - 13:55 Hot!

What's New: In version 4.0 of DriverMax, driver downloads have finally been enabled. You can download driver updates for Windows Vista.

DriverMax 4.0 features:

- Download drivers for Windows Vista.

- Check for driver updates.

- Get a lot of information about your hardware and drivers, for computers running Windows Vista and Windows XP.

- Backup all or just some of your drivers. Keep all your drivers in one place.

- Restore all your drivers from the backup, in a few minutes. This is especially handy after you reinstall Windows.

Download: DriverMax.exe | 3.2 MB, Freeware

Screenshot: >> Click here <<

Link: The DriverMax web site

20 Comments

Anyone use this? Is it any good? It looks like a free account to use it, but does that only "allow" you to see what drivers you need to download?

Yes, it is good, was 3.4 then 3 days ago it updated to v4.0.

Driver part now works, but, not if none of the drivers it tells you about it has.

Still needs a couple more months till it swings better.

It works to a point but its telling me my 360 controller drivers are out of date and links me to the drivers I have and its telling me a bunch of my usb drivers are out of date but they aren't and again points me to the drivers I have installed. I think this is more for backing up all your drivers.

I totally updated my drivers to the very latest, by hunting them down myself and my Driver Detective v6.3.2.4 still tells me my webcam drivers are out-of-date.

Sometimes I think, 'whats the point'!

Is this anything like Driver Magician? I got Driver Magician free a while back on a giveaway site, but its a bit hit and miss

Just checked out the Driver Magician website and these do sound like the same animal.

Just tried Driver Magician and it seems to be exactly the same, it even found the same drivers the other did...drivers I already had installed. Not obscure drivers either, but it pointed at My 8800GTS, X-Fi, logitech, and some Intel chipset things...all of these were already completely up to date. I think these things would be good after a clean install as they find the right drivers, but for whatever reason doesn't see these particular drivers as already installed.

It doesn't even connect to the server xD...

program error, check your internet connection. This happens about 4 out of 5 attempts to check for drivers. Then after finally reaching the page that tells you what drivers you need, it takes over a minute to download the tiny files it needs to download the drivers

Also, they have a bunch of chipset drivers (in my case, the intel 945G) that are usually packaged together in 1 driver (at least that's usually how it works I think) such as memory controller drivers etc.

It also wants to replace the manufacturer's driver with the Microsoft driver.

Semi-useful but there's no way I would ever buy this if it wasn't free.

But hey, it's free!

Prime

(prime2515102 said @ #6)

program error, check your internet connection. This happens about 4 out of 5 attempts to check for drivers.

Prime

Ditto. Took it off after 10 frustrating mins.

i also get the internet connection error, stupid bloody program.

Yup me too

Also when I try to identify an unknown piece of hardware it says it cannot and I am not to get in touch with them.

Wish I hadn't given them my email address now - i've got the feeling i've been scammed!!!

its just worked for me now (after about 8/9 attempts). its taken me to a page and shows me the out of date drivers with links to download.

I didn't have any issues. It is and was free soooooo

I don't think Driver magician is driver max, but it's possible. I know that Driver Agent appears under about 10 different names on the web. You might want to try Radarsync . It does the same thing for free, and doesn't require a registration (it's also a much better app).

Ok, the softare is a great concept. It just doesn't work - moreover, it provides links to versioning that doesn't exist. It also should be clear about lack of x64 support. It'll run but it dpesn't work properly.

Totally agree, I was just curious as to what it would find.

This is an official response from Innovative Solutions, the makers of DriverMax, to many of the messages above.

In the first few days after the release of DriverMax 4.0, a lot of users downloaded it. For example, CNet's Download.com published an article about DriverMax on their home page, and we had 18000 downloads in 2 or 3 days from CNet alone.

This is why the DriverMax server (which offers driver updates) got overloaded and very slow. Many users received timeouts when trying to connect to the server, or couldn't connect at all - the program showed a "check your internet connection" error.
We have fixed the problem. The DriverMax web site and server is much faster now, and the connection errors are gone.

We invite those who couldn't connect, or who found our system unbearably slow, to try again. They will be pleasantly surprised by the speed DriverMax has now.

DriverMax 4.0 adds driver downloads for computers running Windows Vista. This is a feature that was requested by many users.

For Windows XP users, we don't offer driver downloads yet. This is because of technical reasons. We will add that in a few months.

Many people here have said that DriverMax is "exactly the same" with Driver Magician, Driver Detective, Driver Agent, RadarSync, etc. This is NOT true.

DriverMax is COMPLETELY DIFFERENT from the programs above, it has been developed from scratch and is based on a totally different concept.

Also, one big difference from the competition is that DriverMax is FREE, has always been FREE, and we are committed to keeping it FREE for as long as possible! I believe this in itself is a great benefit for our users, compared to our competition.

Regarding identifying unknown hardware - if DriverMax wasn't able to identify your unknown hardware, there is no way we can help you identify it. It means we don't have the information required to identify the hardware. We are working all the time on expanding this information. Contacting us about this would be pointless, since there's nothing we can do. Since DriverMax is a very popular program, if every user contacts us about their unknown hardware, then we'll have lots of e-mail - support requests for which we can do absolutely nothing to help our users - and this is why we request you not to contact us in case DriverMax can't identify some hardware parts.

thanks, its good to known that there are companies that put attention on the customer's opinions.

What Magallanes said, thanks.

**** Disregard above****

I'm back to my original impression. I see you updated to 4.1, I gave it a shot again...sorry but I'm being pointed to drivers I already have installed which are the correct drivers. Now why these correct drivers are being tagged as out of date or wrong while others are not is the problem, these are mostly chipset or motherboard drivers. Its no big deal to me because my drivers are always correct as I'm very particular about that as a lot of us are. I was just curious as to what this program was about its not something I would use anyway. Now the backup function may be of use to me tho. Im gonna check that out now.

Solardog, thank you for reporting this. In fact, all the messages on this forum have helped us a lot to understand how you, our users, perceive DriverMax, and to take measures to improve it.

The problem you mention can happen in several cases. It's not a bug - it's more of a misunderstanding caused by the way the current pages are designed. We have studied all of them, and we are in the process of fixing them - however, this may take a while. We are working on a design that is much clearer about which drivers are available, from which companies, etc.

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DriverMax 4.0 with downloadable driver updates for Vista

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