Driver Magician Lite offers to do just that: Backup Windows device drivers so that they can be restored whenever they are needed which in turn means no more searching for driver CDs when a driver is needed.

The program comes as a portable version and installer. Probably the most convenient feature of the application is that it marks user-installed drivers in red. Those drivers have been installed by the user of the system after the operating system has been installed. They usually consist of video card, audio, printer and other third party device drivers.

Drivers can be backed up by selecting them in the application and clicking on start backup afterwards. This spawns a folder browser menu to select the folder the drivers will be stored in.

All drivers are stored in a direct format that Windows will recognize if pointed to that location. It is also possible to install the device driver directly from the backup folder with a right-click on the inf file and the selection of Install from the context menu.

All drivers are stored in their own folder to make the identification as easy as possible.

Driver Magician Lite is a handy program for users who want to reinstall, upgrade or install the Windows operating system. The software is compatible with 32-bit and 64-bit editions of Windows and available for download at the developer website.

It is quite easy to check if Windows is still listing old device drivers on the computer system. All that needs to be done is to access the Windows Device Manager. The easiest way to do this is to press [Windows Pause] which will open the System Properties. A click on Hardware > Device Manager will open the device manager.

The first step in there is to enable the display of hidden devices. Hidden devices are all devices that are currently not connected to the computer system. This can be old device drivers or hardware devices that are currently not connected. To enable hidden devices click on View > Show Hidden Devices.

Windows will now display those devices in the list of hardware devices. Now it is time to click through all the hardware categories of the device manager to scan for devices that are not longer in use. This can be computer monitors, input devices like keyboards or mice, video cards and practically any computer hardware that can be replaced.

A right-click on such a device will provide the means to uninstall the device driver from the computer system. The uninstallation should remove the device entry from the device manager. Nothing can go wrong if you happen to uninstall working hardware devices from the system. Windows will either automatically install the new drivers at the next startup or prompt for a driver disk to perform the installation.

Cautious users might want to create a device driver backup before starting the process.

The software application has a surprisingly small size of just 1 Megabyte and runs pretty solid and fast. After the initial scan of the system’s device drivers a backup can be initiated. It is up to the user to backup all device drivers or only the drivers that have been selected. The backup software provides filters to display only OEM or third party drivers as well as only those drivers that have been digitally signed or are fully portable.

The device drivers can be stored on the computer’s hard drive using custom descriptions, filenames, path formats and device path formats. The device drivers will be stored in separate device folders by default. Each folder contains the drivers of that device. This can be a single .inf file or dozens of files that are needed for the device.

Once a device driver backup has been created it can be used to restore that set of drivers on the computer system. You can either restore a single device driver by installing the driver from the directory it was saved in or all device drivers from withing the device driver backup software.

Backup and restoration of backed up device drivers is a quick and easy process which makes Device Driver 2 a perfect companion for a USB device with enough storage space to store the drivers.

The device driver backup software comes with a few command line parameters to automate the backup and restoration process further. There is also a command line builder which is currently only available in Italian language. It should however be relatively easy to use it to create the parameters needed for the desired operation.