Service Manager now is a free third party program that home users and administrators can use to manage services and drivers not only on a local PC running Windows, but also on other PCs of a computer network.

The program is offered as a portable version and installer. I personally had problems with the installer (it would simply hang until its process was killed) and no problems whatsoever with the portable version.

When you first run Service Manager you will see all Windows Services in a table. Services are listed with their name, type, start type, status, process ID, account, path, version, language and activation time among other values.

A click on a table header sorts all services this way, which can for instance be handy to display all started services or services owned by a specific company next to each other. When you enable admin tasks you can manage one or multiple services directly from within the program interface. It is then for instance possible to start, stop or restart services.

A double-click on a service opens a new window that lists all service parameters. Here it is also possible to change the service and start type, as well as user account and password the service is started from.

A filter at the top offers to hide or display active, inactive or Microsoft services. You could uncheck the MS box to hide all Microsoft services from the listing.

The second option that the program offers is to display Driver related information in a similar listing. You can either display drivers and services mixed, or only one of them. Drivers are also displayed with their name, type, start type and a handful of additional values. A double-click opens a similar detailed listing of parameters, and the links at the bottom of the interface offer the same management options like starting or stopping drivers on the system.

The third option offered by the program is to connected to a remote host to display its services and drivers in the listing.

The menu bar at the top links to several interesting features. This includes options to export the listing into a csv file, to start the Event Viewer or Task Manager, or an option to create a new system service.

Windows users can download Service Manager from the developer website. The program is compatible with 32-bit and 64-bit editions of the Microsoft Windows operating system.

So how do you back up the drivers in your Windows installation and how can you use these?  In all versions of Windows the drivers are stored in the C:\Windows\System32 folder in the sub-folders Drivers, DriverStore and if your installation has one, DRVSTORE.  These folders contain all the hardware drivers for your operating system.  In the folder location, C represents the drive on which you have Windows installed, this may be a different letter on your system.

You can simply copy these folders out to seperate storage (DO NOT MOVE THEM) such as an external USB drive or Pen Drive.  When time comes to reinstall the drivers you can copy the folders back.

Now there are a couple of ways to reinstall the drivers.  The easiest way is to simply restart the PC when the driver folders have been copied back to see if Windows automatically detects drivers for uninstalled hardware.  This is possible, but won’t be the case for all your hardware.

To install drivers for the missing hardware you need to open the Device Manager.  You can do this by typing Device Manager into the search box in the Start Menu.  You will see all your uninstalled drivers highlighted with a small yellow warning triangle icon.  You need to Right-Click on each one and select Update Driver.  Because the correct drivers are already in the drivers folders on your computer, telling Windows to find the drivers automatically should always install the correct one.  You may however, in some cases, have to tell the Device Manager which folder to look for.  You can either point it directly to one of the two drivers folders, or just at the System32 folder; making sure you tick the box “include subfolders”.

There is an important caveat with this.  The drivers for 64 bit (x64) and 32 bit (x86) versions of Windows are usually different.  This means that if you copy x86 drivers into an x64 copy of Windows; or vice-versa, they will not install.  Windows will recognise them as being incorrect.  You cannot use this method therefore when migrating your system from the 32-bit version of Windows to the 64-bit version when, for example, adding more memory to your PC.

You CAN use this method to migrate drivers between Windows Vista and Windows 7 (and back again) as both operating system share the same driver model, but again not between x86 and x64 builds.  You CAN’T use this to migrate Windows XP drivers to Vista or Windows 7 however as Windows XP uses an older driver model and the hardware drivers for XP are not compatible with the newer versions of Windows.

A backup of those drivers can be a safeguard in case of computer problems, for example when everything needs to be formatted and newly installed. A driver backup before that process could be used to restore the drivers once the system has been setup again.

Semper Driver Backup is a free backup software for the Windows operating system. Unlike standard driver backup programs it runs the backup on all system devices and components. That’s good on the one hand as it makes sure that everything gets backed up, not so good on the other hand for keeping an overview and managing the device backups.

The drivers are backed up with a click on the backup drivers button in the program interface. The software displays a list of drivers and their inf files in the interface.

One of the biggest issues of this technique is that it does not seem possible to restore a single driver from within the application interface. If you click the Import Drivers button all drivers that have been backed up before will be restored.

While that’s convenient if the hardware of the system has not changed, it could be problematic if hardware has been replaced or added.

Drivers are on the other hand placed in a folder under My Documents. Some are stored with inf files that can theoretically be used to install the drivers, provided that it is possible to identify the correct inf file of a device which may not be as easy as it sounds with more than 200 driver files backed up and cryptic names like netrasa.inf or nettun.inf. It is however possible to use the information displayed by Semper Driver Backup to link files to drivers.

It is not difficulty to use, provided that all you want to do is to backup all system drivers or restore them.

How does Semper Driver Backup compare to previously reviewed applications like Double Driver, Driver Magician Lite or the portable application Driver Backup 2?

The core difference is that Semper Driver Backup can only backup and restore all existing drivers whereas the previously reviewed applications can backup and restore drivers selectively.

Interested users can download the backup software from the developer website. It is compatible with all recent versions of the Windows operating system (via).

If Microsoft would not include support for thousands of devices by default, you would have to supply those drivers during installation. Last time I had to do that was when I installed Windows XP SP2 on a SATA hard drive. I had to load the SATA driver during installation so that Windows identified the hard drive correctly.

Default drivers may be all you need to work with your operating system, but if you experience device related problems, or want additional functionality, then third party drivers and driver updates are your best bet. One example: While it is perfectly fine to use the standard Windows keyboard driver with your shiny new media keyboard, you may want to use the media or macro keys on your keyboard, which you probably can’t with the standard driver. That’s where you may want to update the hardware driver of the keyboard to get that functionality.

But it is not all about new functionality. It can also be about performance or stability. Video card drivers usually improve the card’s performance with every update. Gamers benefit from those updates, as do users who rely on their video cards for other tasks, for instance video editing or recording.

Identify Hardware and Manufacturers

The first thing that you need to do is to identify the manufacturer and model of the device. The model is especially important, as manufacturers often release different versions of a hardware which may use different Windows drivers.

I’m going to show you manual and automatic ways of looking up model and manufacturer of devices in Windows.

Manual hardware identification

The information about model and manufacturer may be out in the open, for instance engraved on the computer mouse or wireless router, or hidden from sight if the hardware is internal. The receipt or instructions manual may reveal information about hardware as well. Still, there is usually no way around diving into the Windows Control Panel to get detailed information about the PC’s hardware and devices.

The following guide is based on the Windows 7 operating system. Users of previous Windows operating systems will however find lots of similarities.

Click the Start Orb at the left of the taskbar and select Control Panel from the menu that pops out. Select System and Security > Device Manager from the list of available Control Panel applets.

You find a listing of all devices that are currently connected to the PC. The devices are sorted into various categories like network adapters, display adapters or DVD/CD-Rom devices. You need to double-click on the name of the hardware group or a single-click on the arrow.

Sometimes, that is all you need to do to identify the hardware model right away. If you look at the screenshot above, you see that my computer has an NVIDIA GeForce GTX 470 display adapter. Now, this does not really tell you anything about the manufacturer of the card, only that it is based on NVIDIA hardware. This is different from other hardware like the devices listed under disk drives, where you see the manufacturer directly.

Display drivers are special, as you often have the choice between NVIDIA’s reference drivers that get updated frequently, or drivers by the card’s manufacturer who may not update the drivers that frequently but sometimes have additional features built-in that are not available if the reference drivers are installed.

Keep the device manager window open and fire up a web browser to find and download the drivers.

Driver Download

I tend to install the reference drivers because of the frequent updates. Now that you have found the name and model of your hardware you need to locate the latest drivers on the Internet. A good start is an Internet search for that name and model number followed by drivers, for instance Geforce GTX 470 drivers. You can also search for manufacturer and drivers, for instance Logitech drivers or Ati drivers. Another possibility is to search for the homepage of the manufacturer instead, e.g. Samsung homepage or Intel homepage.

The domain names usually include the company name, e.g. nvidia.com or logitech.com. These sites usually link to drivers on their homepage. If you cannot find a drivers link try the downloads section or support section instead.

Locate the driver for your device and operating system, and compare its version number to the version installed on your computer. Sometimes you do not know which driver version you have installed. You can find that out under the Drivers tab of the device properties.

Compare the driver version and date to the latest version displayed on the driver download website. If the version on the website appears to be newer, download it to your computer.

You can alternatively use a third party website like Driver Zone to locate the right device drivers for your hardware.

Install driver

You can simply double-click on the downloaded driver to install it on the system. That’s usually all it takes. Some cautious users may want to uninstall the active device driver first before they install the new one. This can be done by selecting Driver > Uninstall from the hardware’s properties dialog in the Windows Device Manager. Sometimes you may need to restart the computer after you have installed the new driver.

Automatic Options

Software can assist you greatly when it comes to updating device drivers. A free program like Hardware Info 32 displays valuable information that the Windows device manager does not. You get information like the name of the company that sold the video card, or the exact motherboard version.

This makes it a lot easier to find the appropriate drivers on the Internet.

There is also software that can scan the computer for hardware and drivers, and compare those drivers versions to an online database. Device Doctor is a free application that can do that. Just start the program, select Scan from the list and you get a list of available driver updates with download buttons.

Some words of advice though. You should compare the drivers that are offered by applications like Device Doctor with the version and model installed on your computer to avoid installing the wrong or outdated drivers. I’d also refrain from installing chipset drivers this way.

Let me know how you update your hardware drivers in Windows.

Henry Bridge, Google Chrome product manager, confirmed that “users with old graphics drivers experienced a significant increase in crashes when using these [WebGL and GPU-accelerated HTML5 video] features”.

Google as a consequence has added “ranges of old drivers to Google Chrome’s software rendering list”. This means that users with hardware acceleration compatible hardware cannot use the feature because the drivers they have installed on their systems are outdated and thus blacklisted.

Google recommends that users should use the latest major version of their operating system and install the latest device drivers that are available for the computer.

Recommending the latest major version of the operating system could severely irritate Chrome users who run an older version. Windows XP for instance is still by far the most used version of Windows, and asking XP users to update to Windows 7 to use hardware acceleration in Chrome could convince some to make the easier change to another web browser instead.

The second recommendation, to update device drivers, is recommended by all browser developers. The process is not complicated as long as one knows which hardware is installed on the system and where to download the latest drivers.

The core problem, at least on Windows, is that the operating system does not offer a repository for all drivers, which leaves Windows users with no other choice than to download and install the drivers manually.

The following links lead to websites where the latest device drivers can be downloaded:

• ATI Drivers
• NVIDIA Drivers
• Intel Drivers

Free and commercial driver updating tools are available which can simplify the updating process. Most are however known to produce false positives as well which means that the programs need to be used with caution. We have reviewed some here: Windows Driver Updates.

Hardware acceleration is one of the new core features of modern web browsers, and with that feature comes the necessity to install and run the latest device drivers to avoid the problems that Henry Bridge mentioned in the blog posting.

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.

That’s why most troubleshooting guides on the Internet recommend to perform a system update that includes updating the system drivers to see if the updated drivers resolve the encountered problems.

Windows does not have an official repository for drivers which means that users either need to visit the websites of the hardware manufacturers individually, access a third party driver database instead or use a program like Driver Magician to aid them in the updating and handling of system drivers.

Driver Magician recommends a driver database update on the first startup to ensure that the latest driver signatures are used in the detection of the drivers. It will afterwards display the list of drivers in its interface with options to backup, restore and update some or all of the drivers.

The driver manager will only display drivers that are not installed by the Microsoft Windows operating system. This usually means that drivers for video and audio cards, computer monitors, printers and other connected devices are displayed in the list.

It is possible to display the drivers that have been installed by Microsoft as well so that some or all of them can be backed up as well. Drivers can be backed up to folders, as a compressed file, as a self-extracting file or an auto setup package that will install all the drivers in the package upon execution.

Driver Magician offers an option to update system drivers as well. The update button will query a database on the Internet for all drivers of the system. Updates are displayed in a list with an option to download them to the local computer system.

This will install the standard driver installation files that the user needs to execute manually to update the drivers. It is recommended to double-check the updated drivers before installing them to make sure that they are indeed newer than the installed drivers and compatible with the operating system.

The program offers additional tools to work with drivers including tools to uninstall drivers, identify unknown devices and to backup or restore the Windows Registry, MyDocuments and desktop.

Driver Magician makes it very easy to backup, restore and update drivers in Windows. The software is currently available for free at the Giveaway of the Day website. It is also available at the developer’s website where a trial version of Driver Magician can be downloaded.

Ma-Config is a French service that is available in English as well (with some leftovers that are not translated).The service can be used with an ActiveX plugin directly in Internet Explorer or as a download for other web browsers.

The service itself is run in a web browser. The system’s configuration will be detected upon the user’s request and a summary of the hardware components that have been discovered will be displayed after the system scan.

A click on the Find button after clicking on the Find The Drivers button at the top will search the database of the service for newer drivers. Everything that is found during that process will be displayed in an overview afterwards.

The devices were identified correctly by the service. Most of the drivers that have been suggested on the other hand did not need to be installed. The service did for instance suggest a beta version of the Ati Radeon Catalyst driver although the final driver was already installed on the system. That could have been a problem with Ati’s versioning however as the beta driver used a newer driver packaging version than the final driver.

It is therefor recommended to check the suggested drivers before installing them. This in turn makes the service less comfortable to use. Some users might prefer to perform a manual search for updated drivers instead (which they have to do anyway when analysing the findings of the program).

Ma-Config might come in handy on the other hand if drivers cannot be find manually. The computer hardware list can be exported into a pdf file that can be downloaded to the computer system.

Ma-Config is not the only service that tries to make the Windows driver updating process more comfortable. Device Doctor, 3DP Chip or Driver Max are just a few of the alternatives. (via Make Use Of)

Driver View is a quality computer software that has been designed for exactly that purpose. It will create a listing of all computer hardware drivers that are loaded into system memory. The listing contains extensive information about each driver including the name, company and product name, modified date, description, file type and filename.

The software highlights non-Microsoft drivers and offers the additional option to hide all Microsoft drivers in the listing. Each column is sortable which makes it easier to find specific drivers in the long listing. A search is integrated in the software as well.

It is possible to export the data into various formats including html, text or csv. It is furthermore possible to generate reports from the command line. Driver View is another excellent Nirsoft application that is compatible with most Windows operating systems including Windows XP and Windows Vista.

Things are very different now. And thanks to Ubuntu there is a very simple route to adding these proprietary drivers to your system.? This article will show you how to manage this task.

Opening the tool

Figure A

The first thing you need to do is open the tool for managing proprietary drivers. You might not have to go searching for this tool if you see a small icon in your panel that looks like a tiny PCI card. If you see that you only need click on that icon. If you do not see that icon, however, you will have to venture through the menu system to find it (see Figure A). Fear not, the menu entry is simple to locate: Click on the System menu, the Administration sub menu, and finally the Proprietary Drivers entry.

Figure B

The window that opens (see Figure B) will be the only tool you need to enable or disable the drivers you need for your hardware.

Scroll through the list of drivers for your hardware. One of the first bits of information you need to look for is the “Recommended” tag. That is the driver you should select. Believe it or not, this tool is actually very good at choosing the correct driver for your devices.

Once you have selected the proper driver click the Activate button and the driver will be activated. Of course, depending upon the hardware the driver is for, you might have to either log out and log back in, or even (gasp) reboot. Most likely you will only have to log out and log back in.

That’s it. That’s all it takes now to load a proprietary driver in Ubuntu.

Final Thoughts

Of course there are many purists out there who wouldn’t even think of loading a proprietary driver on their machine. But if you’re looking to get more from your hardware, and your desktop, you will most likely want to go this route. I have used many NVidia cards on many Linux distributions and I have yet to find an open source driver that can work as well as the proprietary drivers can.

Hopefully some day the open source equivalents will catch up (or the makers of the proprietary drivers will open up their code). But until that day I will continue using tools like this to enable my machines to work as well as they do.

And in the case of some wireless cards like those with Broadcom chips – work period!

Anyway, some free programs to update Windows drivers exist. We have reviewed Driver Max in the past. The application has made some leaps version wise. It can not only be used to scan for Windows driver updates but also to identify unknown hardware or to perform device driver backups. A click on the check for driver updates button in the updates and identification category will start the scan of the computer system’s hardware.

The results will be displayed on the website of the software developer in table form listing the name of the device as well as the installed version and the latest version in the database. A disk symbol at the end of each line leads directly to the download of the device driver.

The download pages list all downloads for the selected device. There is no mentioning if the drivers are alpha, beta or final drivers and it is recommended to perform a search on a search engine to verify the result. The suggested update for the outdated Intel Chipset Software Installation on the test system turned out to be an alpha driver. A quick search revealed a final driver that was available for download.

The list of downloads could use some filtering options to filter languages and alpha or beta drivers. Still, it is a better alternative than searching for all device driver updates manually. It will at least list the drivers that are not up to date anymore which will narrow down the manual process to a minimum. A free registration is required to use the program.

A similar program is 3DP Chip (read: Computer Driver Updates) which will only scan the most important components of a computer system.

The software interface is divided into various tabs and windows that display all kinds of information. The main window display a device tree, device list and drivers and services tab. A selected item will be displayed in detail on the right window. The information are color coded and make use of checkboxes to allow for mass editing and removal of devices and drivers.

The different view modes are interesting for most users. It is possible to display only hidden and detached drivers and devices which makes it easy to analyze and remove those from the computer system. Hovering the mouse over an entry will display a popup with extensive information about that entry.

It is possible to search for specific devices or drivers using the in build search and to print or export the device list to a txt or csv file.

Device Remover is a professional looking software program for the Windows operating system that provides the means to manage device drivers effectively. The download of the setup file on the author’s homepage failed during the test but it was possible to download the portable version without problems.

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.

One free driver update software is RadarSysnc 2009. It can be downloaded freely from the developers website and does not require registration to download or update drivers on the computer system. The software was not completely free in the past which has changed with this year’s version.

The process is as simply as it sounds. The option to scan a computer system will be available after starting the driver updater. All components that updates were found for are displayed in a list afterwards. The list contains the name of the component, the status and a link to details about the update.

The very same menu contains a button to Download all driver updates at once which will change the status to Ready To Install. A click on that will install the selected driver.

The Detail window is important as it displays information about the installed driver and the updated driver such as versions of both so that it is possible to compare them before installing them. It furthermore contains information about the driver that has been downloaded including links to the developer’s website. The menu contains additional links and options like reporting a bad download, sending a link to a friend or downloading a different driver (other operating system or version).

A scan of a test system was mostly successful. One problem that was encountered was that the software found an updated video card driver which turned out to be a Windows Vista update. Unfortunately the test system was running Windows XP. Could be a one time blunder but it could eventually lead to installations of the wrong drivers on a system. So its best to always check the information the program is providing before installing any drivers on the system.

A driver is a small software program that allows your computer hardware to communicate with the operating system installed on your machine. That means every piece of hardware right from the keyboard and mouse to your CD-Rom drive, video cards, etc. needs a driver if it’s going to function properly, irrespective of whether you’re a Linux or Windows user.

Almost all of us have faced driver problems at one time or the other. This can happen when you’re doing a fresh install, re-installing an OS, switching from one OS to another or for a reason you just cannot fathom. The easiest solution in most cases is to just re-install the driver. But what if you don’t have it?

For missing or corrupt drivers, Nodevice is your savior. The website boasts of a collection of more than 30,000 drivers on their website. Drivers are categorized either according to their use or the company who manufactures them. This way you can find the driver you’re looking for easily in case you know the model number of your device.

Nodevice has drivers available for all sorts of hardware, including mobile phones, usb devices, and mp3 players. To download a driver, click on the one you want, wait a few seconds (a la Rapidshare) and then save the file to your computer. The site also has a Help section for new users who need help with installing and removing drivers or finding which one is right for them.

A site like Nodevice is handy to have around when the driver you want is unavailable at the original manufacturer’s site. The only thing you have to be careful of is that you install the right driver for your machine.

What do you think of Nodevice? Is it helpful for new users? Do you know of any other sites like it? Where do you normally check for missing drivers? Let me know in the comments.

A click on the scan button starts a system scan which took only a matter of seconds on my system. All drivers are afterwards listed in a table in the main program window. They can be sorted by name, date, version, manufacturer and several other parameters with additional filters being available from the top menu. It is for instance possible to list only non-Microsoft drivers.

One or multiple drivers can be selected by checking the box in the first column of the table. A click on the Backup button will open a configuration menu where the user can pick a destination folder for the backup.

The Restore button works in the opposite direction. The user has to browse to an .inf file that has been created by a previous backup so that the driver can be restored. There is also the option to save and print a list of all drivers currently installed on the system.

The website of the developer is no longer online. You can download the latest version of Double Driver here from Ghacks instead. Double Driver (665)

Please note that the tool to backup and restore drivers is no longer updated, which means that it will eventually become incompatible. Alternatives are Driver Magician Lite or Slim Drivers.

If you updated the drivers of your video card regularly you will notice that most drivers are unsigned drivers and they work without problems. If Microsoft would verify them their release would be delayed quite a bit. As far as I know it is not free to get drivers signed either which means it would not make much sense to get beta drivers signed.

Unsigned drivers are however normally the source of driver problems in Windows XP. The easiest way to get a list of all unsigned drivers that are installed is by using the command line tool sigverif. Press Windows R and enter sigverif in the run box. A new window will open named File Signature Verification.

Click on Advanced in that window, check Look for other files that are not digitally signed and choose to look in the folder C:\WINDOWS\system32\drivers. Click ok and start. Windows scans the folder for unsigned drivers and displays them in a list afterwards.

The list is automatically written in the file SIGVERIF.TXT and can be used to verify unsigned drivers using the tool verify. I will write another article about this soon.

When you burn a CD or DVD in Windows, your DVD burner usually uses the DMA (Direct Memory Access) mode. Basically, this allows you to transfer large chunks of data onto your DVD, using as little CPU memory as possible. In other words, it helps you burn your DVDs faster.

However, Windows has this weird concept of switching your drive to a lower mode, depending on read/write errors. This means that after around six errors, your DVD drive will automatically shift to a PIO mode. This requires more CPU memory to function, which in turn greatly slows down burning speed. If your drive is in PIO mode, burning one DVD will take you more than an hour.

There are a few ways to switch your drive back to DMA mode, depending on whichever one you choose. I’m going to provide two of them. First, right click My Computer > Properties. Go to Hardware > Device Manager > IDE ATA/ATAPI controllers. Click on the ‘+’ sign next to it and then right click on the Primary or Secondary IDE channel (depending on which one your burner is connected to) option and select Properties > Advanced Settings. Look at the entry in the ‘Current Transfer Mode’. If it says ‘PIO’, you know that the mode has been changed.

The First Method

In the first method to revert back to DMA mode, in the Advanced Settings tab, there is an entry labeled Transfer Mode. Click on the drop-down menu next to it and select the option ‘DMA if available’. Click OK on the Advanced Settings tab when you are done. Windows will ask you if you want to reboot for these settings to take effect. Allow your PC to reboot. Then go back to your Primary or Secondary channel (whichever you changed) and look at the Current Transfer Mode. If it still says PIO, this method is not working for you.

The Second Method (This is a more radical one)

The second method is to simply UNINSTALL your drive. Go to the IDE ATA/ATAPI controllers and right click on the channel to which your drive is connected. Select ‘Uninstall’ and go ahead and uninstall the drive. Then reboot your computer. When it reboots, Windows will automatically detect your drives. Once, this is done, go back and check your drive mode. It should automatically be in DMA mode. If not, select the Transfer mode as DMA and then reboot again. This time it should definitely work.

Note: I realize that most of you will be a little apprehensive about the second method. None of y’all know me and I cannot guarantee you that this will fix your problem. All I can say is that I’ve used this method (more than once and on different PCs!) and it worked for me every time. However, if you don’t want to try uninstalling your drives, that’s fine. I’m not forcing anyone to do anything they’re not comfortable with.

Via [onthegosoft]

DLL Archive is able to clear this mess. The freeware scans and verifies all dll files on your system and adds them to a list of dlls that are most likely obsolete. Most likely means that there is of course a chance that this dll is still needed and for this purpose DLL Archive archives the dlls which means that they are moved from the system dirs to an archive dir (DLLArchive in the windows folder). You have to work with your computer as usual at this point, reboot it for instance and see if everything is still working as intended.

If you receive errors you should move the dll that is mentioned back to the system directory. I performed a scan and it found more than 450 dll files. I decided to archive them all and see what would happen. Well, nothing happened at all. I was able to reboot my computer, start my programs as usual without problems at all.

The size of the DLLArchive folder was 196 megabytes, this is huge if you ask me. I suggest you keep those files at least for a week and see if any error pops up at a later time. If not appears delete them or back them up before you do.