It is not unusual for you to receive a computer without any driver disks. If later you decide to format the hard disk and re-install Windows, where would you get the drivers from? In the situations like this, Double Driver comes for the rescue. Double Driver is a portable application using which you can backup and and restore the drivers installed on a Windows based computer. Double Driver is freeware and supports all versions of Windows from XP, Vista to 7.
You can download Double Driver from its web site at http://www.boozet.org/download.htm. The download is available in form a ZIP archive. You have to extract all the files in this ZIP archive to a folder. Both the GUI edition dd.exe and the command line interface (CLI) edition are included in the ZIP archive. You have to right-click on the dd.exe and choose Run as administrator to start the Double Driver GUI application with administrator level access.
On running the dd.exe, the main Double Driver window opens up. It clealy shows you in the log whether you are running this application as a standard user or as administrator. Running dd.exe as an administrator gives you the options to fully scan, backup and restore all the drivers on your computer. This is not possible for a standard user. To start scanning up the drivers, click on the Backup button in the toolbar. Then click on the Scan Current System button as shown,
The scanning takes only a few seconds. After scanning Double Driver automatically selects the non-Microsoft drivers for backup. This is a good idea because Microsoft drivers are already included with Windows and are automatically installed when you re-install Windows on your system. You can also customize your selection by including or excluding any drivers you want. To backup the selected drivers, just click on the Backup Now button and choose a destination. The backing up process takes a few minutes. You have to copy the contents of this destination folder over to a removable drive like a USB pen drive or a blank CD/DVD disk and store it in a safe place.
If later you want to restore the drivers from the backup, just fire up Double Driver again (with administrator level access) and click on the Restore button on the toolbar. Then select the backup folder containing your drivers backup by clicking on the Locate Backup. You can select which drivers you want to restore from the list. Finally click on the Restore Now button to start the restoring process.
Double Driver is a very simple and useful tool which not only allows you to view all the drivers installed on your system but also allows you to backup, restore, save and print all the chosen drivers. This is certainly the tool that everyone, wanting to format and reinstall Windows, was looking for.