Driver Fusion 5.0

22 September 2017

We’re pleased to present Driver Fusion 5.0! It’s been a while, but we’ve been working hard on bringing you this update. Our mission was to improve the performance, stability, usability and the offered features. You can read the highlights of these improvements below. We hope you like this version as much as we do!

Interface and usability

We’ve been focusing our efforts on improving the interface and it’s usability and have redesigned almost everything. It’s still familiar to previous versions, so you won’t have to learn from scratch. An important highlight, by popular request, is that you can now search, filter and sort through content, almost everywhere! But that’s not all, it’s also possible to use Driver Fusion 5.0 with just your keyboard. We’ve added focus hints to all controls to make it easy to see where the current focus is. You’ll see how nifty all these changes are once you start using them.

Health check

Up until now, there were two categories for downloading drivers; missing drivers and outdated drivers. As they did almost the same work, they have been combined into driver update. If you’re checking for driver updates, clarity is essential. We’ve been receiving a lot of feedback on why Driver Fusion is recommending certain drivers. Whenever a recommended driver is not undeniably clear, it will now add an explanation. Still having doubts? Feel free to contact us and we’ll help you out. At times you want to take a closer look at a device or its driver. You can now go directly to the device or its driver in device control. Another frequently requested feature we’ve added is that each recommended issue can now be fixed on its own. Don’t worry, you can still fix all issues at once.

Device control

Starting with Windows Vista, there’s additional information available about a device or a driver. This information was already used throughout Driver Fusion and has now been added to device control. All available information – including the identifier – is now accessible immediately after selecting a device. Driver Fusion 5.0 also ships with several other important improvements to device control. If you want to install a driver it now includes compatible drivers from Windows’ driver store. For experts, we’ve also added the ability to uninstall a driver from Windows’ driver store. The driver signature verification is also significantly improved, both the results and the performance (on average a driver is now verified twice as fast).

Device monitor

If you want to monitor your devices, Driver Fusion has always given you a variety of options to do so. The current sensor values are great for getting insight into your devices, but sometimes you want to visualize past performance as well. In Driver Fusion 5.0, we’ve added a graph – for each device – for the available sensor values. It’s super flexible, and will allow you to add just the sensors you want to display. We’ve also added additional information about each device, such as the socket of your processor, the BIOS version of your motherboard, and the reallocated sector count of your hard disks.

Driver cleaner

Need to clean up old drivers or install a new driver? All drivers received new entries to be up-to-date with their latest versions. We’ve also added support to clean the device itself and entries from the task scheduler and Windows’ driver store. Several new drivers have also been added, including NVIDIA’s GeForce Experience software. In Driver Fusion 5.0 we separated entries that are shared between certain drivers. While cleaning those drivers – such as NVIDIA’s display driver and NVIDIA’s GeForce Experience – you can now decide whether you want to include their shared entries. We’ve also added a hint when drivers are combined by the manufacturer to support multiple devices, such as Logitech’s keyboard and mouse drivers.

History

Sometimes you want to view or restore an operation you’ve performed in Driver Fusion. Our goal for Driver Fusion 5.0 was to create an easy to use – and complete – history of almost anything you can do. Whether you clean a driver or disable a device, you don’t have to worry anymore about the outcome as you can always undo the operation. In most cases, you want to restore the entire operation. Operations that are merely collection of other operations, such cleaning a driver, can also be restored separately. We’ve also visualized if the operations you performed succeeded.

In driver cleaner: some installers cannot be restored because they are missing on your computer. This is not a limitation of Driver Fusion but due to how Windows or these installers are set-up. You can manually download the installer again.

Settings and data

It’s good to have choices, like the ability to change the default preferences of Driver Fusion. In Driver Fusion 5.0 we’ve changed a few default preferences to their expected value. We’ve also combined several settings and – where applicable – extended their functionality throughout the entire application. A diagnostics report for troubleshooting can now be created from the general settings.

To benefit from Windows’ file protection, Driver Fusion will now store its data in different folders. Data that can be shared among all users, such as driver backups, is written to the ProgramData folder. User-specific data, such as your settings, is written to the local AppData folder. This change also enables you to use Driver Fusion in multi-user environments without having to share your settings with everyone. If you want to override this behavior and have Driver Fusion store its data in the installation folder, you have to start Driver Fusion using the --p argument. This does not apply to the Steam edition, data will continue to be stored in the steamapps\common folder in order to utilize Steam Cloud.

Operating systems support

Driver Fusion 5.0 will be the last update for Windows XP and Windows Vista. Microsoft itself ended support for Windows XP in 2014 and Windows Vista in the beginning of 2017. Unsupported operating systems receive no security updates, have known exploits, and can be dangerous to use. You can continue to use this version of Driver Fusion if you rely on these operating systems. The content service behind Driver Fusion will continue to work for the foreseeable future. We have disabled automatic updates on these operating systems. You do not need to do anything else.

Feedback

You play an important role in making Driver Fusion better. We welcome your feedback on this version, as well as any ideas you might have. Please contact us on our website.