I find myself burning down my primary Windows machine every semester, or every time it gets a bug. Windows 7 does have great support for my motherboard but not for things like my video card, my wifi adaptor, and other devices. Re-blasting Windows can take an hour and even longer to find drivers on the fly so im going to talk for a little bit about exporting your drivers before you burn everything down, and then import them back once all is done.

Driverbackup is a nice GUI application that combs your Windows system and looks for installed drivers for your hardware and offers to back them up to a location of your choosing (if you’re getting ready to burn the hard drive down then I hope it’s an external drive).


This application is idiot proof, and being as such, has served me well. I will link it to the download page later. This is something people should consider also if they are employed in a business environment where hardware is not standardized and different computers have like seven different drivers. A huge time saver.