Many thanks, Ed.

I may be regarded as some kind of “lone nut” for trying to keep motherboards running as long as possible.

You might be surprised to learn the manufacturing dates for some of our backup storage servers!

Honestly, motherboard longevity is a perfect test for the scientific method.

Windows 7 is the best we could achieve, because the CPUs have LGA775 Prescott cores which do NOT support “PrefetchW”.

As such, Windows 10 will  NOT install on those PCs:  we tried!

Another gripe is our HP scanner:  HP never upgraded that scanner’s drivers for Windows 7 et seq., so that PC must remain at Windows XP for the duration now.

Honestly, I get a little peeved whenever I’m told to stop adding toxins to solid-waste dumps, at the same time I’m criticized for trying to keep old PC hardware running AOK.

p.s.  I’ll take a look at “Snappy Driver” .

Rich with CyberCPU Tech gives a nice, succinct verbal presentation, plus a very short on-screen demo.

His verbal presentation explains why the on-screen demo is very short.

Don’t miss the caveats at the very end, because they may be extremely important to your particular system(s):

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zSP8uIcF43Q

From his presentation, it seems very wise to update only one driver at a time;  then, with that incremental approach, identifying a buggy driver update should be much easier to isolate.

cleaning gigabytes of Windows Update files should be a User Option e.g. either delete completely, or “move” to high-capacity backup storage

when trying the DriverEasy software, we deciphered its file management scheme and wrote a short BATCH program to copy all downloaded drivers to a high-capacity HDD

that made it EZ to delete the source files that had been downloaded to our C: system partition;  and, if we did decide to install an updated driver, we did so using the copy(s) stored on that high-capacity HDD + by launching Windows Device Manager

the only difficulty that arose with our BATCH program was the need to maintain a text file that mapped drivers to the coded folder names that DriverEasy generates randomly e.g.: here’s a short list of such coded folder names:

033sir1c.gov
1r0aptex.ojf
4hogrmvd.vda
5wmxx1ma.mbt
dfu0obw3.fkk
Drivers.data
e0ighwgs.hcc
gvsh0ckl.bwu
hxggpsg4.xuq

Even if we neglected to maintain that text file, searching a top-level folder for a .sys file stored below it was also easy, using the DIR and ATTRIB commands.

Hope this helps.

All excellent points!  especially “Russian Roulette” (NOT my favorite game).

It seems that many of these third-party “driver updaters” have turned up often with very serious problems, like the ones you mention.

I mentioned it originally because this is the kind of feature that could be added to Microsoft PC Manager, e.g. perhaps by optionally enabling “Administrator Mode” like Command Prompt.

Windows Update has been having so many inter-related problems, imho MS should add features to PC Manager that at least allow the User to:

(1) display a complete list of all installed drivers and all missing drivers

(2) indicate whether each installed driver is the latest, or not

(3) select an option to download the latest driver

(4)  optionally LOCK a preferred driver, to block all future updates

After (3) above, an Administrator should already know how to update a driver using the features already available in Device Manager.

The latter approach would completely separate driver management from everything else that Windows Update attempts to do on a routine basis.

Also, a flag could trigger PC Manager to inform the Administrator that certain drivers need to be downloaded from the manufacturer’s website e.g. GPU drivers.

Since AI is all the rage at present;  I can’t think of a better application for AI than one that allows Administrators to achieve a complete set of the very latest AND signed drivers.

FYI:  this review summarizes several third-party solutions:

“The Best Free Driver Update Software for Windows in 2023”

https://www.avg.com/en/signal/best-driver-update-software

I fully understand your policy:  it’s a good policy.

Many of our challenges result from trying to keep very old H/W operational.

When we were upgrading our LAN to 2.5G, several USB dongle manufacturers insisted that their software worked with Windows XP.

That turned out to be NOT the case.

So, in that instance, the manufacturer’s download website was misleading at best, and mostly worthless.  When we brought this to their attention, they did nothing.

On a different occasion, NVIDIA’s website listed the “latest” GPU driver for a low-end graphics card (PNY GeForce GT 730), but it failed to install.  In that instance, we had to try a series of older drivers until we tried one that installed without any errors.

As such, the driver that does work is obviously “outdated”.

Sometimes, the “bleeding edge” is worth a drop or two  🙂

And, yes, Windows OS could and should have a discrete utility that displays a spreadsheet of all devices needing drivers, the corresponding installed drivers (if any) by version numbers, the responsible manufacturer, and some indication that each is the latest or not.

It could also support an option that resembles “add or remove program”:  this option should delete obsolete driver files in the C: partition that are no longer needed e.g. a newer GPU replaced an obsolete GPU.

And, I would prefer that such a utility be entirely separate from Windows Update.

DriverEasy’s design comes very close to such a utility, but it has other problems e.g. it fails without SHA-2 Code Signing Support.

… fractured English

It’s still go plenty of rough edges.
…
fractured English:

nevermind, i found it in intune.