If you’ve owned a Windows PC for longer than 2 months, you have most likely seen a couple of the much-hated Blue Screens of Death. The Blue Screen of Death (as known for its acronym:BSOD) is a complete crash of the Windows Operating System and it means that the OS cannot recover from it and does the only thing it can: shut down showing some hints of why it might have occurred. At least, that’s Microsoft thinks.

The Blue Screen of Death can be attributed to many factors, some of them related to hardware problems (faulty memory cards are a likely cause), unstable power supply and, in most cases, a “driver” problem.Drivers are special pieces of software that “talk” directly to hardware elements and allow its use by both the OS and applications, using a common interface, making it easy to swap, say a video card, without having to update the applications that use them.

Most Blue Screens of Death show something along the lines of “MS Windows encountered a critical error……………… try updating drivers to correct………” without much more to start digging for the actual problem.

BSODs are rather common when you install new pieces of hardware or updated your OS, and there lies the rub because those processes may have overwritten some parts of a driver code (which are basically files sitting on your disk) and that is the cause of many headaches.

Windows does offer a sort of a solution by going to your Control Panel, then selecting your hardware list and pressing the “update driver” of the device causing the trouble. However, this procedure is not free from complications, as you may not know which driver is missing and, most likely, the “update” procedure may not work because Windows does not recognize the hardware device or it does not have a copy of the driver files.

Luckily, there’s a simpler solution. Uniblue DriverScanner 2009 is a software that scans your system looking for missing drivers and replaces them. It can’t get simpler than that. The program is only $29.95 so it’s within everyone’s budget. If you’re not convinced, you may want to run a free driver scan and see if you need any drivers for your PC and then decide whether you need the software.