You might not give them much thought, but drivers are central to the smooth running of your computer. While it is the operating system and applications that you might interact with directly on a day-to-day basis, every piece of hardware you have installed needs a software driver to make it work.

Just like any other software, it is important to keep drivers up to date. The latest version of any given driver can not only offer better performance and new features and options, but also address security issues and bugs that may have been detected in older versions. You might think that it would be easy to keep drivers up to date, and in some case this is true.

Windows Update can help with the updating of some drivers, but it certainly does not cover everything, and it does not even always offer you the latest version of a driver. Some companies include utilities with their drivers that will periodically check for new versions, but it is impractical to have a huge number of such programs running at all times.

Or, of course, you could manually visit the websites of hardware manufacturers to check for driver updates yourself. This is a time-consuming and labor-intensive task that few people would be happy to undertake. A far better option is to let Avast Driver Updater do the hard work for you.

Working much like Windows Update does for Microsoft's operating system, the tool analyses your computer and notes all of the various hardware components you have attached. The utility can then cross-reference against a database of literally millions of drivers, and let you know if you need to install new versions for any particular device.

It is a simple idea, but a brilliant one, and one that can make a real difference to your computer's stability, performance and security.