Few things are more aggravating than finding that your printer suddenly won’t print or your e-book reader won’t sync with your computer, especially when you’re in a hurry to get somewhere. (That’s always when these problems seem to crop up, isn’t it?) In many cases, the cause of the issue is an outdated or incorrectly installed driver.
We already talked about updating your GPU drivers but sometimes other drivers can go awry.
If a bad driver is indeed the culprit, you can try to fix the problem manually—or you can turn to a third-party website like Driverscape.
What Is Driverscape?
Driverscape is an online library of drivers for every kind of Windows device out there. It’s a privately-owned site that is not affiliated with any device manufacturer. For some reason, many manufacturers make it rather difficult to get the right drivers directly from them. (It’s probably more ignorance and/or poor website design than malice.)
The idea behind Driverscape is to help you quickly and easily download any driver you might conceivably need without having to hunt for it on the manufacturer’s website.
What’s a Driver, Anyway?
A PC driver is a group of files that make it possible for your hardware—your printer, CD/DVD drive, or game controller—to communicate with your computer’s operating system. Without the right drivers, those devices will work incorrectly or not at all.
These days, universal drivers are bundled with operating system updates and they work just fine with tens of thousands of devices, meaning you don’t have to do anything. That’s not always the case, though. Sometimes you need to hunt down and install certain drivers yourself, especially if the device in question is old or uncommon.
Gamers, in particular, sometimes need old drivers in cases where an update broke a game that had previously worked fine. Still, updating your drivers is often one of the quickest ways to boost your PC’s gaming performance.
How Does Driverscape Work?
There are two ways to use Driverscape. If you know the exact driver you need, you can simply search for it by manufacturer or device category, download it, and be on your way.
If you don’t know exactly which driver you need, only that it needs updating—or if you know that you have several drivers that are out of date—you can try their Driver Update Utility, which is an executable program that can scan your PC and update the drivers for all devices currently installed or connected to it.
Should You Use Driverscape?
So, is Driverscape safe? That depends on what you mean by “safe.”
Is it possible that you could get a virus or other malware by using Driverscape? Yes, that’s always a possibility with anything you download from a website, especially executable programs. The real question is, how likely is that to happen?
In most cases, it’s highly unlikely as long as you practice basic internet hygiene, which includes habits such as only downloading files from sites you know and trust. Driverscape has been around for a few years now and there haven’t been any reports of users’ computers being infected with viruses that were confirmed to have come from Driverscape.
Non-Malware-Related Driverscape Issues
Still, there’s another less dramatic, sense in which you can think about protecting your PC. When you update, remove, or install a driver, there’s always a chance it could break something else (or several other things, in rare cases). The critical system drivers included with Windows are updated frequently and meticulously checked for functionality and compatibility by well-paid software engineers before Microsoft rolls them out to your computer.
Problems with those drivers are exceedingly rare.
Who does quality control on the files you download from Driverscape? That’s a lot less clear. They claim that all of the drivers on their site come directly from device manufacturers, and although we don’t have any reason to believe that isn’t true, accidents and oversights do happen, and they become more likely anytime you add a middleman to the equation.
Final Words
Really, the question to ask isn’t so much “Is Driverscape safe?” but rather “Is Driverscape necessary?” We think the answer is: no, not really. It’s certainly at least a little safer to get any drivers you need directly from the manufacturer’s website. And even though it’s hard to find what you need there in some cases, the amount of time you’re likely to save by using Driverscape is usually minuscule, probably a minute or two at most.
If, for some strange reason, you had dozens of drivers that were all out of date, and you were sure of that, and you didn’t really care too much if your PC got borked, then it might make sense to use Driverscape’s Driver Update Utility. That’s a pretty niche case, though. For the most part, you should probably just grit your teeth and dig around on the manufacturer’s website, even if it’s mildly unpleasant.