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.

With Driver Sweeper you can scan for those leftovers and remove them. The interface has not changed a lot. You still have the sidebar menu to access functions and settings of the program. Here you can select Analyse and Clean to display the list of supported hardware manufacturers. Included are AMD and NVIDIA, Microsoft, Intel, HP and Realtek among others.

You need to select the manufacturers and device types that you want to scan the system for. This could be an issue for inexperienced users. A click on the Analyse button scans the system for driver leftovers. All orphan drivers are displayed in a list with their name, file type and path on the system. In this case, I have used the program to find AMD display driver leftovers. As you may recall, I switched recently to NVIDIA.

All entries are selected by default with the option to uncheck items so that they are not removed from the system. The software crawls both the hard drives and the Windows Registry for leftovers. A click on Clean removes all selected files and Registry entries from the system. A reboot is usually required afterwards.

A backup is automatically created which means it is possible to restore individual driver files or all files that have been cleaned previously. Removal of the ATI driver leftovers on my PC system freed up 88 Megabytes and removed dozens of ATI related files in the system32 folder.

So what has changed since version 2.1? The development log lists many changes, here are the noteworthy ones:

• Improved Registry, driver and directory cleaning methods
• Support for additional user interface languages
• Service and Process stopping features to prevent entries from being locked
• Added Asus Sound, Microsoft Keyboard, Intel Chipset, NEC USB, Fresco USB, Marvell Storage, JMicron Storage, JHP Printer, Realtek Lan cleaning

Driver Support has been improved as you can see from the listing. Driver Sweeper is still compatible with all recent 32-bit and 64-bit editions of the Windows operating system. You can download the software from the developer website. Make sure you pay attention to the setup as you may install third party software otherwise.

ServiWin is a Nirsoft application that aids the administrator and user in troubleshooting driver and service related issues.

The program starts up in driver list mode on startup. It is basically a list of all system drivers that are currently known to the system. This includes drivers that are loaded or stopped.

Each driver is listed with is name and display name, status, startup type, description, versions and company related information. Especially the startup type and driver version are helpful in troubleshooting driver related issues.

The toolbar at the top contains buttons to start, stop and restart a selected driver. The right-click context menu offers even more of those including changing the status to pause and the startup type.

As you can see from the screenshot there are also options to research a particular driver on Google and to create a HTML report of selected drivers or all drivers of the system.

The File > Save Selected Items menu can be used to save the selection to a text, xml or csv file.

You can switch to Services Mode, the second featured mode of the program. You do that with a click on the Services button in the toolbar, via the View menu or by pressing F8.

This list mode displays all services of the operating system along with their names, statuses and startup types. That’s handy to troubleshoot related issues, for instance the Print Spooler service when troubleshooting printer drivers.

This mode supports the very same options as the driver mode. From changing statuses and startup types over researching a driver on Windows to exporting the information to a file or a HTML report. The software supports troubleshooting remote machines. This is done by entering the IP address of a remote computer via the File > Select Computer menu.

ServiWin is a handy portable software for the Windows operating system. You can download it directly from the Nirsoft website. (via)

Software that can scan the system for outdated drivers has become popular in the last years. They are usually powered by a huge driver database on the Internet that will be used to compare the installed drivers and devices with the latest versions in the database.

This automatic approach offers several advantages but can lead to problems as well. The main advantage is obviously the uncomplicated use. Users of all experience levels can scan their computer system easily and update the drivers that are found to be outdated by the scanner.

The disadvantages is a chance for false positives if the device is not identified correctly and that updates may be missing since they need to be added to the database before they can be displayed to the user.

Driver Easy has recently been updated. The software is easy to use and will perform a thorough scan of the computer drivers and devices.

Each computer driver that is not up to date is displayed in the results window after the scan with options to download and install the driver right from the program’s interface. That’s a different behavior when compared to many other driver updaters who usually redirect the user to a website where the computer driver can be downloaded.

It is recommended to verify the drivers that are displayed as updates before they are installed to avoid installing incompatible or older drivers on the computer system. The software found several drivers that needed updating on a test system but failed to find the last driver update for the Ati Radeon video card.

Driver Easy is a very comfortable software that can be used as a first step to update a computer system’s device drivers. The software is compatible with 32-bit and 64-bit editions of Windows XP, Windows Vista and Windows 7. The download is provided at the developer’s website.

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.

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.