Awesome Freebie: Driver Collector

Faithful readers, today I'm bringing you not one, not two, but three amazing, free, and Null-certified tools for your PC-lovin' pleasure.

First up is Driver Collector, which is so insanely handy I barely know where to start in singing its praises. Built for Windows XP, Driver Collector does one thing and one thing only: It scours your system for hardware you have installed, then finds the drivers for that hardware, and lets you back them up. You can then copy all those drivers to a CD or a thumbdrive.

Why would you want to do this? Many reasons, but the most useful is for when you are reinstalling Windows on your computer. Nothing is more frustrating than finishing up a Windows installation, only to find that Windows couldn't find a driver for your video card (and has stuck you with the heinous 800 x 600 default resolution)...nor has it found the drivers for any of your networking components, so you can't just hop online to download the video driver.

With Driver Collector, you can just back all those drivers up and install them immediately without having to go web hunting on a second PC. It's only a few hundred kilobytes and runs without having to be installed.

Curiously, Driver Collector is several years old and was created by an individual who seems to have vanished from the planet. The link I've provided is to the site where I found it, not the official site, which no longer seems to exist.