Have you backed up your drivers recently? Yep, I know, all of you have a full and complete backup of your entire drive. But wouldn't it be handy to have just the critical drivers for, say, your mouse, graphics adapter, printers, and who-knows-what-other-devices in one spot?
Why would you want a driver backup? If you're reinstalling Windows, what better than to have all your drivers in one spot, ready for those pesky hardware devices ranting for their driver. Or if one hardware device goes kaflooey, say, your printer, Windows will pop up and try to reinstall the hardware's driver. If you don't have the original CD handy (or even if you do), it's much easier to aim Windows to your new "driver backup" folder to find the driver.
Drive Those Choices
WinDriversBackup finds all the essential hardware (and some software) drivers on your PC and backs them up. It works by creating a folder and copying all the drivers to individual folders with the name of the driver. [Thanks, Tracy F.]
WinDriverBackup does the job in a jiffy
Just as good is DriverMax, also free, because it not only backs up all your drivers, it also zips them all into one handy file. [Thanks, Steve C.]
Uh, PCWorld's Lincoln Spector provides a free batch file to backup all drivers to a folder, though it doesn't zip them up:
http://www.pcworld.com/article/id,122935-page,1/article.html?findid=56022