When you buy a new PC, the vendor will almost always provide you with a “driver CD” that has the device drivers for all the hardware that’s inside your new machine. The CD comes handy when you are reinstalling Windows from scratch or are trying to recover your machine to its original state after, say, a system crash.

There are however two drawbacks with the driver CD.

First, you need to remember the physical location where you placed that CD months ago and second, it may have outdated device drivers. Hardware vendors continuously release new and improved versions of drivers but if you are restoring drivers from an old CD, you are bound to install the old and outdated versions which may be both slow and buggy.

An easy solution to this problem would be that you take a backup of all the device drivers that are currently installed on your system and put them on a CD or another drive. Double Driver is a free utility that can help you with this process.

Double Driver scans your Windows system and creates a listing of every since device driver that’s installed on the system. When you click the “backup” button, the tool will place all the drivers in separate folders - the modem drivers will be in one folder while the display related drivers will be in another one and so on.

Important: Double Driver is portable and requires no installation. However, if you are using it under Windows 7 or Vista, make sure you run the tool as an administrator.

This will make it easier for you to restore the relevant drivers without having to remember any of the file names and other technical details.

Double Drivers is available for Windows XP, Vista and Windows 7 and is compatible with both 32-bit and 64-bit edition of Windows.