Whenever I need to troubleshoot a device problem such as sound card, I’ll usually remove the drivers and then reinstall it back. It may sound easy but I can really waste a lot of time doing that. Sometimes their Internet connection is so terribly slow and it takes me half an hour to an hour just to search and download the correct drivers. That’s why I always have a universal drive CD CD with all current drivers for Windows XP.

But on a computer that has just finished installing Windows, it is also troublesome using the universal driver CD to detect unknown device and install the driver. If you’ve installed driver before, you’d know that the drivers had to be installed one by one followed by restarts, unless you’ve previously backed up the drivers using some third party driver backup software which can be restored with a click. I wanted the whole process of installing drivers on a new computer to be much easier and a more automated way.

I am glad that I found a way to do it using DriverForge and I am sharing with you all.

DriverForge is a program that will automatically install all drivers from a specified location. Imagine this, you can give a family member or friend a CD/DVD/USB stick with every driver they could ever need. Create an autorun.inf to automatically run and install all drivers from that removable drive on their computer. IT folks can use it post-imaging to install the rest of the drivers they didn’t want to install pre-imaging. Especially helpful to install drivers from a mapped location.

This is how DriverForge works. You must put all COMPRESSED (.7z) drivers at the root of ONE chosen folder (not in any sub-folders of that folder), which will then be UNCOMPRESSED TO another chosen location. Any uncompressed drivers can be in ONE folder but it is recursive (drivers can be in sub folders as well). The program installs the drivers FROM the UNCOMPRESSED location.

It’d be much easier to understand if I show you the step-by-steps.

1. Download DriverForge and save it to a new folder. An example is C:\DriverForge

2. Go to DriverPacks page and download the packs you want. It has driverpacks for Chipset, CPU, Graphics, LAN, MassStorage, Sound, WLAN and you can download all of it if you want to. Copy the .7z packs to the same folder where you saved the DriverForge.

3. You can either burn the whole DriverForge folder to a CD or copy it to a USB flash drive. I’d recommend you to burn it to a CD and I’ll explain the reason of that later.

4. Whenever you encounter a Windows computer that requires installation of drivers, just pop in the CD and run DriverForge.vX.X.exe. (X.X is the version number).

5. Check Restart when completed (Usually Windows will require to restart after installing drivers) and Delete uncompressed drivers when completed (to save hard disk space).

6. Click Start button and it’ll automatically extract the driver packs to install the correct driver for device that has yellow question mark or yellow exclamation mark in Device Manager.

Automatically installing drivers for most unknown device on any Windows computer can’t get any easier than this. Oh yes, the reason why I advice you to burn it on a CD rather than USB flash drive is because a driverforge.ini (configuration) file will be created when you first run DriverForge. When you plug in a USB drive on different computer, you may not get the same drive letter, and you’ll have to reselect the compressed file location. One solution to solve this problem is to make the driverforge.ini file Read Only.

[tags]drivers, driverforge, driverpacks, device, windows[/tags]