One Tip A Day » Drivers

Update Your PC Drivers Automatically With RadarSync

Tony Williams — Wed, 28 May 2008 21:36:32 +0000

Updating the drivers on your PC can lead to better performance and improved stability. However, keeping drivers up to date isn’t the easiest thing to do. The first problem tends to be that you don’t know where to get drivers, or you’re not prepared to spend the time hunting them down. And then to cap it off, un-installing and re-installing drivers can be too difficult for some individuals.

One way to simplify the process is to install RadarSync. This free application will check your PC and find software and driver updates. Once updates have been identified, RadarSync will download all updates for you to install.

More: RadarSync

20 No-Cost PC Upgrade Tips

Tony Williams — Mon, 21 May 2007 23:35:18 +0000

Techlogg.com is my site discovery of the week. One of the reasons I love blogs is that they allow normal people to share their knowledge and expertise with a large audience. One great post on Techlogg.com gives 20 no-cost PC upgrade tips.

Techlogg is correct in their assertion that many PCs are not running at their full capacity, and i’s not necessary to spend money to get a 20% increase when you could implement 20 tweaks that could potentially give a 1% increase each.

Here’s the list of tweaks they’ve come up with. Check out the site for the full guide.

1) Move the Windows system page file
2) Switch off XP’s fancy look
3) Use RAID 0 on your system
4) Starve integrated graphics of memory
5) Check the heatsink/fan combo
6) Check for dual-channel memory support
7) Clean your PC
8) Use aggressive CMOS settings
9) Adjust the front-side bus (FSB) speed
10) Look for multicore-enabled applications
11) Run fewer apps at the same time
12) Turn off hard drive power-down
13) If it’s charged, pull it out
14) Drop the screen resolution
15) Find faster video codecs
16) Get the latest device drivers
17) Patch your IDE drives
18) Defrag your hard drive
19) Get the latest motherboard BIOS updates
20) Reinstall Windows

Update Your Software And Drivers With RadarSync

Tony Williams — Wed, 18 Apr 2007 21:19:18 +0000

RadarSync is a free application that will search your PC and in under 2 minutes will tell you about any new drivers and software updates that are available. I haven’t used this service yet, but I have bookmarked it for future reference as it could be quite useful.

Radarsync is extremely tiny at only 300kb which is good. There are two service levels available. The free service provides a report of what updates are available, whereas the premium Radarsync service provides direct links to download the updates, which will save you a time applying updates.

To try out RadarSync click here.

How To Update And Remove PC Drivers

Tony Williams — Sat, 24 Mar 2007 21:27:03 +0000

Updating your drivers and software sometimes can significantly improve the speed of your PC and software, as well as fixing old bugs or adding new functionality. Unfortunately, many manufacturers don’t build into their applications an auto-update process, so the only way to do this is manually.

I get around this by keeping a bookmarks folder on my PC where I store links to the sites for all my software and hardware. Then every month or so, I spend 30 mins upgrading all my software and drivers. This is a good habit to get into to keep your machine running smoothly and to stop problems happening further on down the line.

Remving old drivers properly is just as important. Sometimes hwhen you uninstall a device, the drivers may still be using valuable system resources. To ensure you don’t have any old drivers installed do the following:

Press [Windows]+[Break] to bring up the System Properties dialog box
Select the ‘Advanced tab’ and click ‘Environment Variables’
Click the ‘New’ button
In the New System Variable dialog box, type ‘devmgr_show_nonpresent_devices’ in the Variable Name text box and ‘ 1′ in the Variable Value text box.
Click ‘OK’ twice
Select the Hardware tab and click the Device Manager button
In Device Manager, go to View | Show Hidden Devices
Expand the various branches in the device tree and look for the washed out icons, which indicate unused device drivers
To remove an unused device driver, right-click the icon and select Uninstall

Remove Unused Drivers in XP

Tony Williams — Sat, 30 Sep 2006 21:42:08 +0000

Did you know that unless you uninstall a device driver on a Windows XP
machine that it still may be sucking up valuable system resources? If you are a serial upgrader like me, then you could have developed quite a mess on your machine.
TechRepublic has step-by-step instructions on how you can view and remove these
unnecessary devices.

More: TechRepublic