Microsoft Windows | Keith Shirley

Jan 22

Review Driveragent.com – a life saver when fixing a PC

Keith Shirley | icon2

Review, Tips | icon4

January 22, 2009| icon3

8 Comments »

DriverAgent

Time for another little secret of mine that has saved me huge amounts of trouble. If you are regularly fixing PC’s then you must have access to a site like DriverAgent.com.

Put simply – Driveragent runs a small piece of software on the PC that scans it and gives you a report on which drivers are out of date. It then gives you the opportunity to download those drivers from the manufacturer or their own website. That’s it – short and sweet and it just works. A screenshot of the report is below – just click to enlarge it.

I’ve worked on hundreds of PC’s over the past 20 years and I despair at the thought of how much time I’ve lost trying to find drivers for a PC. The pricing for Driveragent is currently just $29.95 for use on upto 10 PC’s. Compared to the time you would spend trying to find drivers on just one manufacturer site it’s a bargain.

If you are having problems with a PC crashing or running slowly – try the free report from DriverAgent to see what state your PC is in.

Next week I’ll put up a post on the blog with one of my absolutely best rescue tools – it will probably surprise you. To get the update automatically sign up for mail updates or add the RSS feed to your reader.

Rated 5/5 on Jan 22 2009

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Oct 20

USB Mouse Problems

Keith Shirley | icon2

Tips |

October 20, 2008| icon3

4 Comments »

I was having problems getting a USB mouse from Targus to work properly (model PAUM010). As the mouse was a freebie from a sales event 2 weeks ago I didn’t want to spend too much time on it.

This blog entry is replacing the notes I’d normally write (or at least with all good intentions would plan to write). Maybe it will be of use to you.

The original error was from Windows Vista complaining that there was a problem installing the driver as it was written for Windows 95 (I’m sure it said 95 and not Windows 98….I should have written it down).

My usual steps (change port, restart PC) did not work. Then I remembered I had gone through something like this before.

Open Windows explorer
Go to C:\Windows\System32\DriverStore\FileRepository (assuming that is where windows is installed to)
Copy any folders starting with msmouse to a temporary folder e.g c:\temp
Plug the mouse in again if needed and wait for the install to fail
Start the Device Manager from the Control Panel
You should see the “Unknown Device” displayed. Right click on it and select update driver.
Choose the option where you can tell Windows which folder to use. Point it to c:\temp if that is where you copied the msmouse folders to.
Click OK and be happy when it works.