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Sep 20, 2026
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IObit Driver Booster is a free driver updater for Windows that scans for outdated, missing and broken device drivers, matches them against a database of more than 19 million, and installs them with a restore point taken first.
Driver Booster scans Windows for drivers that are missing, outdated or broken, and installs replacements from IObit's own collection.
It takes a restore point before it changes anything, so a bad update can be undone.
You can download IObit Driver Booster Free here, and the free build is not a trial.
What Driver Booster Actually Does
A driver is the small piece of software that lets Windows talk to a piece of hardware - the graphics card, the sound chip, the wifi adapter. When one is missing or out of date, the symptom is rarely obvious: no sound, a screen stuck at the wrong resolution, a network adapter that vanishes.
Driver Booster scans for those, matches each device against IObit's database - more than 19 million drivers by their own figure - and installs what it finds. The scan takes a minute or two and asks nothing of you.
The safety net is the part worth knowing about. It creates a restore point before installing, keeps up to three previous versions of each driver, and can put the old one back in a click. Driver updates are one of the few things that can leave a PC unbootable, so a tool that plans for that is doing the right thing.
What the Free Build Includes
IObit sells a Pro edition and advertises it inside the free one, so the fair question is what the free build leaves out.
| What you want to do | Free | Pro |
|---|---|---|
| Scan for outdated and missing drivers | Yes | Yes |
| Download and install them from the database | Yes | Yes |
| Roll a driver back after a bad update | Yes | Yes |
| Update drivers on a PC with no internet | No | Yes, using an offline package |
| Free up resources before launching a game | No | Yes, Game Boost |
| One-click fixes for no sound, no network, wrong resolution | No | Yes |
| Export a report of what is in the machine | No | Yes |
Nothing in the free build expires or counts down. Pro is a paid yearly upgrade, and the advertised discount is permanent enough that the list price is not a number anyone pays.
The offline option is the one genuinely worth the money, and only for one situation: a freshly installed Windows with no network driver, where the machine cannot reach the internet to fetch the driver that would let it reach the internet.
WORTH KNOWING
The upgrade prompts are the real cost. IObit runs a large product line and the free build sells it: the installer offers other IObit tools, the main window keeps a Pro button in view, and finishing a scan puts the Pro features in front of you. Read the installer screens rather than clicking through them, and decline the extras you did not come for.
Find Out What You Already Have
Before installing anything, it is worth knowing what is in the machine - it takes two minutes and it changes the answer.
GPU-Z names your graphics card and the exact driver version on it, and CPU-Z does the same for the processor, motherboard and memory. Both are free, tiny and read-only.
GLview Extensions Viewer reports the card and driver alongside what it actually supports, which is the answer when a program complains about OpenGL. For monitoring rather than identifying, GPU Shark watches temperatures and load.
If the problem is the opposite - too many old drivers piling up rather than too few - Driver Store Explorer shows what Windows has hoarded and lets you clear the versions nothing is using.
When a Driver Updater Earns Its Place
Windows Update handles most drivers quietly and does it well enough that most people never think about it. A tool like this is for what is left over.
- A fresh Windows install where half the hardware is unrecognised and Device Manager is full of unknown devices.
- Old or obscure hardware whose maker has gone, or whose download page died years ago.
- A laptop where the maker's own support page lists drivers for a model number you can no longer read.
- A machine you are fixing for someone else and do not want to spend an afternoon on.
For the graphics card it is the other way round. NVIDIA and AMD ship driver updates far more often than any database keeps up with, and the difference shows in games.
Go direct: the NVIDIA GeForce Game Ready driver for gaming, or the NVIDIA Studio driver if you edit video rather than play games.
For the graphics built into an Intel processor, the Intel Graphics driver is the one to take.
The same goes for the pieces underneath. AMD Ryzen chipset drivers come from AMD, and Realtek HD Audio Codecs are the right answer for most onboard sound.
One more thing that is not a driver at all: if a game asks for a missing DLL on startup, that is usually the DirectX runtime rather than anything Driver Booster can fix.
Who Should Look Elsewhere
Here is the tell, and it takes thirty seconds without installing anything. Right-click Start, open Device Manager, and look down the list.
If nothing carries a yellow warning triangle and there are no entries called "Unknown device", your drivers are fine and no updater will make the machine faster. That is the single most common reason people install one of these and feel nothing changed.
If you would rather not hand driver updates to a company at all, Snappy Driver Installer Origin is free, portable, carries no adverts and works fully offline once you have its driver packs - our news piece covers why it handles Windows 11 so well.
And if what you actually wanted was to clear out software rather than update it, IObit Uninstaller is the same company's tool for that job.
What It Runs On
- Windows 11, 10, 8 and 7, including ARM64 machines.
- A 1 GHz processor, 1 GB of memory and 1 GB of free disk space for downloads.
- An administrator account, and an internet connection for the free build.
Quick questions
Is Driver Booster really free?
The free build scans and installs drivers with no time limit and no countdown. Pro is a separate paid yearly upgrade, and the table above lists what it adds.
Do I need a driver updater at all?
Usually not. Windows Update covers the common hardware, and graphics cards are better served by NVIDIA, AMD or Intel directly. It earns its place on a fresh install, or on hardware whose maker is long gone.
Is it safe to let it update everything at once?
It takes a restore point first and keeps the previous driver, so a bad update can be rolled back. Even so, updating the graphics driver separately is worth doing, because that is the one most likely to misbehave.
Will it make my PC faster?
Only if something was genuinely broken or missing. A driver that was already working correctly does not get faster by being replaced with a newer one.
Does it work without an internet connection?
Not in the free build - it downloads each driver as it goes. Offline updating using a prepared package is a Pro feature.
Does it work on Windows 11?
Yes, and on Windows 10, 8 and 7, including ARM64 devices. IObit's own page still lists Windows XP among the supported systems, which is boilerplate left over from far older releases.
More utilities of the same kind sit in Other Tools, alongside the hardware identification tools named above.
Download IObit Driver Booster Free 14 and see what the first scan turns up, or tell us how you got on if you have used it before.
