Does anybody know of a reliable and cheap (preferably free) source that will check and advise on updates for the many drivers that can be found on a pc?
Obviously, the best bet is to go the the manufacturer sites in the case of cameras and scanners, but that is time consuming even when you know who the supplier is.
I tried a couple that I found on the internet last night. Both did a scan and came back with different results - then wanted me to sign up with a paid subscription to find and maintain all the latest drivers for me.
So I thought somebody must know another way. Any ideas?

Hi Norton
say are they for older software your having trouble finding drivers for? ... I Have used this before to find drivers for my then Pentium 3 windows98 it let me find upto 3 drivers per day on the Free version,It scans your pc to look for outdated drivers and will offer you the later to the very latest ones if available, but do read up on them before you install them some you may have problems with,Its a shared data base which means the more PCs it scans the more Drivers become available,
Its till going so may account for something,
Good luck
http://download.cnet.com/DriverMax/3000-18513_4-10572602.html

Just updated 2 of 13 outdated drivers without a hitch on my Sony i3 its only twelve months old all good I noticed it more user friendly than I remember it,
1 register the Free version allows you 2 drivers per day
2 Custom install (unless you want AVG and all its crap)

If you are going for a fresh install of the same or diff operating system, I use doubledriver. It backs up all your drivers into a Zip in case you ever need to reinstall. I dont think it can update though but worth mentioning.

First, you don't ever need to constantly update drivers. The only time you'll need to do it is when you install a new OS and then you'll need drivers for everything installing once.

Second, any program that 'scan for drivers' are likely to be malware ridden. Avoid them all. And definitely don't pay for software like that.

Last, what bit of hardware in particular are you looking for the driver for? A driver simply enables a particular device to be recognised by the computer. It doesn't need updating (ever). SOFTWARE on the other hand or FIRMWARE is different, and should be updated whenever new versions (or major releases) come out.

The only exception to the above is graphic card drivers, reason being they are bundled with firmware updates which is what you're actually downloading when you update the driver for it. And really, you're only going to need to know ati.com or nvidia.com to update gfx.

Driver upgrades are sometimes required when parts of the system are updated not just the whole Operating System.

Many will have fallen foul of updates to DirectX which necessitated driver updates.

Likewise when WPA2 came in there were updates to wirelesss drivers needed in some cases.

Some of these driver updates are just clearing out bugs from funtionality that wasn't previously used, some were including code for functions that were missing.

It is also not uncommon for driver updates to reduce/elimnate slow downs and hang ups.

Be careful where you download drivers from, there are a lot of very dodgey sites specialise in conning people.

Thanks for your help on that one. It was basically what I thought and expected. As I had noticed a couple of oddities happening, I though I'd check out the drivers as well, hence the question.
Even nVidia checked the system and said there was a later drived, which I installed. When I rebooted, nVidia then told me I had the wrong driver installed, and went back to the previuos one.
So, there's not much hope for the third-party providers. Their software is now uninstalled..

Just jumping in on this topic, I hope you don't mind.
If you need to update ANY Driver on your PC or Laptop, all you have to do is go to the makers website, they offer drivers for free, as in my Toshiba Laptop, I had a dodgey driver so I just went into Toshiba's website, looked for driver downloads and they not only chose the one I needed, but they installed it automatically too....