Software & Apps > Backup & Utilities 62 62 people found this article helpful Free Driver Scout v1.0 A Full Review of Free Driver Scout, a Free Driver Updater Tool By Tim Fisher Tim Fisher Facebook Twitter Senior Vice President & Group General Manager, Tech & Sustainability Emporia State University Tim Fisher has more than 30 years' of professional technology experience. He's been writing about tech for more than two decades and serves as the VP and General Manager of Lifewire. lifewire's editorial guidelines Updated on January 4, 2021 Tweet Share Email Tweet Share Email Backup & Utilities File Types Apps Windows MS Office Linux Google Drive Backup & Utilities Design Cryptocurrency Of all the free driver updater programs we've used, Free Driver Scout is definitely one of our favorites, mostly because it provides truly automated driver installs. Free Driver Scout will search for, download, and install all of your outdated device drivers for you, automatically and without any further taps, clicks, or other work from you. Download Free Driver Scout This review is of Free Driver Scout version 1.0. Please let us know if there's a newer version to review. More About Free Driver Scout Support for most versions of Windows, along with a nice feature that's helpful prior to a major Windows upgrade, are a few of the features you'll find in Free Driver Scout: Free Driver Scout finds and installs device drivers for Windows 8, Windows 7, Windows Vista, and Windows XP. Though not officially supported, it seems to work fine in Windows 10 as well Once Free Driver Scout has found hardware that requires driver updates, you can disable any of them from showing up in a future scan, which is helpful for any hardware that you don't want to be updated all the time You can see the version number and release date of the currently installed driver, as well as the new, updated version date, helpful for verifying that the driver update is really what you wanted Free Driver Scout can backup and restore some or all of the installed drivers for free OS Migration Tool is a feature included in Free Driver Scout that lets you download device drivers for a different version of Windows (such as Windows 8 if you're running 7), which is helpful if you plan on updating Windows to a newer version Free Driver Scout Pros & Cons Automatic driver updating is of course one of the bigger benefits of using Free Driver Scout, but there are some other things to consider as well: Pros: Program is really easy to installSupports manual and scheduled scansUpdates can be configured to be installed automaticallyBulk downloadsNo input is required while updates are being installed Cons: Doesn't find as many outdated drivers as similar software doesTries to install multiple unrelated programs during setupThe software no longer gets updated Thoughts on Free Driver Scout After reading the pros and description from above, it's obvious Free Driver Scout is a really nice choice for a driver updater program if you don't want to have to think about running scans and downloads yourself. On top of that, you can backup drivers and even download drivers for a different OS, which is really great. However, as we mentioned above, Free Driver Scout simply didn't find as many outdated drivers as some other driver updater tools. This is obviously a turn off because even though the software does all the heavy lifting for you, it's hardly the best tool available if others are able to provide more information about outdated device drivers. Also, it appears as though the developer has quit releasing updates to the program. The website doesn't include Windows 10 as an official compatible OS and it's been at version 1.0 for a long time. Download Free Driver Scout During setup, the installer might try to add some unrelated programs to your computer along with the Free Driver Scout software. If you want to disable those programs from installing, you must select Decline for each offer. Was this page helpful? Thanks for letting us know! Get the Latest Tech News Delivered Every Day Email Address Sign up There was an error. Please try again. You're in! Thanks for signing up. There was an error. Please try again. Thank you for signing up! Tell us why! Other Not enough details Hard to understand Submit