News :: 15MR: Driver Magician v3.16

Greeting all and welcome to another 15-Minute Review! Today’s application is Driver Magician version 3.16 by GoldSolution Software—A driver backup, restore and update utility.

As Giveaway of the Day states:

“Driver Magician offers a professional solution for device drivers backup, restoration and update in Windows operating system. It identifies all the hardware in the system, extracts their associated drivers from the hard disk and backs them up to a location of your choice. Then when you format and reinstall/upgrade your operating system, you can restore all the ‘saved’ drivers just as if you had the original driver diskettes in your hands. After one system reboot, your PC will be loaded and running with the required hardware drivers.

What’s more, Driver Magician has a built in database of the latest drivers with the ability to go to the Internet to receive the driver updates. It saves lots of time to find the correct drivers and mature drivers will obviously increase the performance of hardware. If there are unknown devices in your PC, Driver Magician helps you to detect them easily and quickly with its built in hardware identifier database.”

Quick Pros

• Four options for backing up, including building a self-installing package
• Appears to do its job
• Update service handy

Quick Cons

• Update service tells me newer version of my drivers when there isn’t
• Apparent massive memory leaked that required my system to be reboot and is still plaquing me

Expansion

While this application is in theory great, I did have some serious issues and still haunting me from the first time I ran the backup. With four options for backing up your drivers including building a self-installing EXE, this application would have done its job as intended, if it didn’t cause me to have issues. The update service, while handy, also had an issue; It was telling me the version of my nVidia driver and Logitech SetPoint was out of date when it still was the current version.

My issues arose when the backup neared completion. I started having 2-3 windows of RAR compression error windows pop up over and over, with an error that ‘It could not read’ a temporary file in my temporary folder. Sometimes it’d have the error fill the window come up. This was strange indeed, because I did not ask for it to compress them, just for the Folders option. The system then started bogging down, where both my anti-virus and spyware applications ‘crashed’ mysteriously. I couldn’t do much of anything; The thing was going on it’s own. Every time I tried to go the the Task Manager, it told me it couldn’t launch due to an error. Shutdown window only showed the icons and my applications were being killed off one by one, except mysteriously the Driver Magician and Firefox. It looks like a memory leak, however I can not confirm this and do not want to run the risk of running this under debug mode even this time. I didn’t write down any of the information because I was already starting damage control.

As well, I am still having issues. Firefox since I rebooted now pauses for 2 seconds every 10-15 seconds, maxing out CPU usage for that time. I’m still trying to isolate the cause of this issue, and continuing running damage control on my system. All in all I was not impressed and this is the extent of my test of this application.

Final Verdict

Reading through the comments on Giveaway of the Day I see that levitation had the same issue as well, but some others stated that they did not experience these issues. I refuse to try this application again due to the fact that my system was going downhill fast and still appears to be having issues. The application is a great concept, it just ended up being a dangerous event, not apparently because of it handling the drivers, but because of it’s handling of its own memory. Now, I’m off to find a fix for my Firefox issues. Anyone have any suggestions, please pop by my forums

Posted by BladedThoth on Saturday, March 17, 2007