Never Download a Driver-Updating Utility They’re Worse Than Useless.

When Do You Need to Update Your Drivers?.

There is plenty of information online, but these articles by How-To Geek cover the matter pretty well: Investigating online, it turned out that the uselessness of the utilities was widely known. Then I started scrutinizing their recommendations and discovered that virtually everything they reported was either unnecessary or actually a bad recommendation.

Initially, I just let them run and do their thing, and they created problems that I hadn't had. I didn't have any problems, I just wanted to make sure I had the latest and best drivers. I discovered the reality first-hand with many different popular utilities. When I used Windows, these utilities were all the rage.

Even if it doesn't actively harm the system's functioning, you won't see any improvement in performance. Letting it do wholesale replacement of your drivers is more likely to create issues you don't currently have than to solve any problem. They are often the wrong drivers, or a variant of what is installed, like the vendor's generic equivalent of the OEM driver on your system, which has been optimized for your hardware. Many of the 'updates' they report are actually older drivers than what is installed. But the vast majority of what they report is just wrong. These utilities identify most of the drivers in your system and claim they all need updating or there is a better one available. They fill a market hole for people who think they always need the 'latest' drivers. There isn't really a problem you need them to fix. These driver installer utilities tend to be somewhat of a scam. The symptom of driver problems is generally that the hardware doesn't work, certain features aren't available, or you encounter hardware bugs in operation.

If you're having performance issues, the problem is rarely drivers.

Snappy driver