Driver Updater - What we're working on next

[Guest Stephen CCleaner]

Hi everyone! Thank you for the suggestions and feedback so far. Your comments really help us in our quest to make ours the best Driver Updater out there!

 

It's been almost a year since we released Driver Updater. Here's a quick recap of improvements we've made since releasing the feature:

Improving the reliability of driver updating

• We added an automatic scan, which runs once per week
• We added better communication between CCleaner and Windows to determine when to update a driver
• We refined our driver-matching technology to consider more factors about the driver device origin when deciding where to source updates from
• We fixed issues where it took multiple attempts to update a long list of drivers

Getting help if something goes wrong

• We created a guided revert driver flow that helps you to identify the most likely updates related to an issue you are having, so you can easily revert them
• We made the button for reverting drivers more obvious
• We created custom error handling/messages for different types of connectivity errors

Quality of Life Improvements

• We fixed various bugs to make the experience of using Driver Updater smoother
• We added a counter in CCleaner Professional to let you know when you have drivers to update
• We added the date of the latest driver to make it easier to confirm that it was the latest one available

Altogether, these improvements have significantly reduced the likelihood of driver update failure and the need for you to revert driver updates. We also see this drop reflected in your feature experience ratings: our average customer rating for the Driver Updater feature increased to 3.8 out of 5 (up from 3.4 - a 12% increase!)

 

But we won't stop there! Here is what we'll focus on next:

Further increasing reliability of driver updates

• We want to address the situations where driver updating ends badly. This is very technically challenging, so will take some time to get right. Nevertheless, we are committed to improving it.
• We have a dedicated engineering team who are focused on continuous improvement of our driver update technology. They continuously look at the driver with the highest volume-to-failure rate ratio and iteratively work through these from top to bottom (as you can imagine, this is a huge list so there needs to be a sensible method of prioritisation to make improvements that impact the greatest number of users)
• We want to find ways to make this a less manual process so we can increase the speed of fine-tuning the driver updates when they're not a good match

An Ignore function

• We currently allow you to skip an update for a device
• The next step is to allow you to completely ignore all driver updates for a specific device

Clearer progress indication

• Currently the progress bar only shows the progress of updates in the list, but not progress for an individual driver
• When a driver is updated, we go through multiple steps:
  1. Download securely
  2. Check that the downloaded driver file is exactly what we expect it to be (a security feature that protects against hacking)
  3. Check how compatible this update is with the system
  4. Talk to Windows to apply the driver update in the correct way
  5. Confirm to you that the update was successful
• This takes a long time, so we want the progress bar to help you to understand how far through this process you are (especially as the update file download can potentially take many minutes).

 

Do you have any suggestions for how we can improve Driver Updater? Please comment here in this thread! :)