Keeping your PC’s drivers up-to-date can sometimes help to enhance performance, improve stability, and generally make your system run just a little more smoothly. Most people don’t have time to regularly check for updates, of course, but that doesn’t matter as there’s now a whole class of utilities which will do that for you. The latest example is IObit’s new beta, Driver Booster, and we gave the program a quick trial to see how it worked.

It’s immediately obvious that the program is focused primarily on ease of use. There’s no complex interface, no jargon, no searching around trying to decide what you need to do: just launch Driver Booster, it immediately scans your PC, and a report appears just a few seconds later.

The details of any missing updates are presented in a similarly basic way: you’ll see the name of the device, its type, whether the current driver is “Old”, “Very Old” or “Ancient”, and that’s about it. Actual driver dates, version numbers and so on will only appear if you click a “More info” link.

The sparse interface keeps details and distractions to the absolute minimum

This does all make for a very simple interface, though, and the update process is just as straightforward. You can scan your list, clicking the “Update” button for particular drivers, or click “Update All” to grab everything; either way, Driver Booster will then download and launch whatever you’ve selected. Reboot and you’re ready to go.

There’s very little else to the program. There’s no list of your hardware or installed drivers, for instance. No driver backup option. No extras at all, really.

Driver Booster’s default settings are a little annoying, too, with the program setting itself up to launch when Windows starts, yet only check for updates once a week. Fortunately this is easy to change, but it shouldn’t be necessary: if Driver Booster just set up a scheduled task then it wouldn’t have to run in the background at all.

This is still a beta, though – the default settings might change, and there could be other features still to be added. And even now, IObit Driver Booster seems simple, effective and exceptionally easy to use. It’ll take some long-term testing to find out how good the program really is – how widespread is the hardware support, for instance, and how quickly it picks up on new releases – but right now Driver Booster is definitely a program to watch for the future.