Maximum PC

Need: recommendations for good utilities for updating drivers in Win7. Partial to freeware, of course

The only drive you really need to update is the GPU, which if you remind yourself every two months to check, you should be fine. All the other hardware rarely, if ever, gets a driver update.

What kind of driver you are looking for

If you go to windows update and do the custom option, it will tell you which drivers are recommended to be updated. Don't use windows to update any drivers, always write down the drivers that need updating, then go to the manufactures website and get the latest driver. Unload the old driver and install the new driver yourself, that way there is a clean install and not a new driver installed over the old driver which sometimes causes corruption of the installed driver. This goes double for Video drivers!

Nasty

Thanks for the tip. By the old aphorism "If it ain't broke, don't fix it"
I only want to update those drivers that really "need" updating
(of course, it's not clear to me which those are, and the definition of "need").

For gaming I understand prompt update of video card drivers is important,
but I don't know about things like main board chipset drivers, BIOS, etc.
I guess if I'm getting good performance, then I should leave things alone,
but then again, maybe things could be *better*

My experience is that you do have to at least try updated drivers... but first make sure you keep or are able to download the old ones that worked properly.
Ever since I upgraded my Catalyst drivers to version 12, my PC would crash to a black screen when viewing JPEGs with Windows Fax and Picture Viewer. The computer would either recover, or more recently, reboot as if someone hit the reset button. Downgrading to version 11.12 - which I'd saved - solved the problem.

I don't recommend any. The reason why is basically when your computer vendor uses a component they get the driver from the component vendor and modify it. This happens alot with graphics cards drivers and they graphics cards manufacturers do have messages that drivers are sometime modified. So basically i look at the computer manufacturer drivers location and download from there when they do updates. Manufacturers typically don't update drivers for a machine that came out with 1 OS and another came out. In other words they tend to only support a machine with OS's that were on the machine when it came out. I typically will go to the components driver update site if I have upgraded the OS on that machine especially if the machine is out of warranty.

If you use one of those driver update applications it could cause problems because it doesn't have the computer manufacturer fixes.

use driver magician it will find auto matic driver for your system and you can download them by 1 click