View, Print, and Back Up Your Drivers

By Rick Broida, PCWorld

Documents? Check. Photo and music libraries? Check. Drivers? Better double-check. Even if you're religious about backing up important data, I'll wager you never thought to back up all your drivers.
That's an oversight. After all, if your system ever suffers a major meltdown, you'll need mouse, printer, video, and other drivers to get everything up and running again. And take it from me: driver discs always go missing when you need them the most.

Double Driver 4.0 makes fast and easy work of saving all your drivers. The utility scans your system, automatically detects and selects those drivers that aren't native (i.e. part of the operating system), and lets you back them up to any kind of storage: a USB drive, a network folder, etc.

I particularly like the choice of output options. You can save the drivers in a structured folder (meaning each driver gets its own sub-folder), a compressed folder (good if you're saving to, say, a space-challenged flash drive), or a self-executable file (which will automatically restore every driver when you run it).

Double Driver also lets you print a list of your installed drivers and/or save the list as a text file. Both could come in mighty handy if you ever lose the backup itself.

What I like best about Double Driver, apart from it being free, is that it's a portable application. There's nothing to install; it can run just as easily from a flash drive as it can from your desktop.
Ultimately, this is one of those must-have (and must-use) utilities. Take three minutes and make a driver backup. The system you save could be your own.

 

View, Print, and Back Up Your Drivers

Back Up, Restore, and Migrate Firefox

By Lincoln Spector, PCWorld

With all its settings and add-ins, Firefox is a wonderfully configurable browser. Yet there's no obvious way to backup any of those configurations, or to move them to a new computer. There isn't even a clear way to save your bookmarks.

While there isn't a clear way, there is a reasonably easy one. You just have to know how. The trick is to back up one particular folder. I can't tell you the name of that folder, because the name is different on your computer than on mine, but I can tell you how to find it:

First, close Firefox. Doing this while the browser is running will be disastrous.

Once it's closed, select Start, then Run, type %appdata% (with the percentage signs) and press ENTER. Navigate the resulting Windows Explorer window to Mozilla\Firefox\Profiles (in other words, open the Mozilla folder inside your current location, then the Firefox folder inside that, and so on).

Now that you're in the Profiles folder, you'll see another folder with a random name and the extension .default--something like 4hw0enat.default. That's what you have to back up--that folder and all the files and folders inside it. Copy it to a safe location.

Here's how to restore it after you've bought a new PC or reinstalled Windows:

First, you'll have to install, run, and close Firefox on your new or newly setup PC. Then use the instructions above to find your new Firefox installation's Profiles folder. Copy your old .default folder from the backup into that new Profiles folder.

You'll now have two .default folders in Profiles. With the one you just copied selected, press F2to rename it, CTRL-C to copy the name, then ESC to not rename it, after all.

Move up the folder tree to the containing folder, which is called Firefox. Double-click the profiles.ini (Configuration Settings) file to open it in Notepad.

The last line of this file begins with Path=Profiles/. Select the rest of that line (everything to the right of the slash), and press CTRL-v to insert the name of your restored folder. Save the file, then open Firefox and everything should come up the way you want it.

Back Up, Restore, and Migrate Firefox