Driver Genius is driver update software that has an interface you might recognize. It’s laid out with Windows-like menus: buttons for features on the left hand side in a green or blue taskbar and the actual content on the right in a screen with a white background. If you didn’t know any better, you would think you had opened a Windows menu rather than a program that’s going to update your drivers. Unfortunately, this application suffers from the same problem that inflicts a lot of similar applications: it has way too many tabs on the left side of the screen. As it is, the program has nine tabs on the left hand side of the screen: Back Up Drivers, Restore Drivers, Uninstall Drivers, Update Drivers, My Downloads, Options, LiveUpdate and Help. All of those seemingly different tabs could be combined, leaving three tabs: Home, Driver Tools and Options. Simple is better.
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Driver Genius is a hard product to describe because it’s not like the others in this category. There might be parts of it that serve a similar function, but the look and feel of the program is different from what we came across in the other programs we reviewed. This is neither a bad thing, nor does it separate this program as one that should be looked at differently than the others. What it does do is make the task of creating an identity for driver update software a lot more difficult. As it is, the category is kind of ambigious and isn’t popular enough for people to know what it means when they hear it. It’s difficult to pinpoint what driver update software is going to look like a year from now or a few years from now. In the meantime, we would like to see Driver Genius fall in line with the other programs in this category.
Features:
Driver Genius gives you the option to back up, restore, uninstall and update your drivers. You can look at a history of your downloads. An interesting feature within this app is the security option that’s accessible through the options menu. The program itself can’t find viruses, but it’s able to bring up the antivirus program you have installed on your computer to do the job for you.
Ease of Use:
Driver Genius would be a lot easier to use if the issues with the interface were sorted out. The features themselves are pretty self-explanatory, but a bad interface can make a mess of even the most useful feature set. As for the feature set itself, we couldn’t have asked for more ease of use, we just wanted to be able to get to them easier.
Effectiveness:
When we completed a system scan with Driver Genius, it came up with 18 drivers it thought were outdated. Two of those drivers were false positives and 16 of them were actually drivers that needed to be updated. You can also back up the previous versions of your drivers in case you download corrupt versions. If you happen to download bad drivers, you can uninstall them right away before they can inflict any sort of damage.
Help and Support:
Driver Genius has a solid help menu within the program. When you go to the manufacturer’s website, you can use a contact form or an email address to contact them. They also have a user guide and FAQ section. Between all of these options, you won’t have a hard time finding the answers to your questions.
Summary:
Driver Genius is driver update software that tries to make itself out to be more than it is. When we see some improvement in its interface, it could easily move up our list. In its current state, it’s a useful program that could benefit a lot of people. The only thing that’s holding it back is its interface. If the manufacturer of this program were to consolidate everything into one window, the user would have a much easier time figuring out where they need to go to do what they want within the program.
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