As soon as you launch Perfect Updater, it begins to scan your PC for out-of-date drivers. I wish the scan waited until you started it manually, as competing product Device Doctor's does, but this is a minor quibble--as you can pause the scan and you can start it manually if you wish to run it again once you have the application open. And, from this point on, Perfect Updater easily outperforms DeviceDoctor.com's free Device Doctor solution and almost performs as well as ReviverSoft's $30 , a similar application that's a worthy rival.

Once Perfect Updater has located your out-of-date drivers, it presents them to you in a neatly organized list that makes it easy to see just how old they are. Driver Reviver offers a very similar view, but Device Doctor offers no such details at all.

If you're using the free trial of Perfect Updater, your experience ends here. But if you are using the paid version, you can move on to the updating process: You can select which drivers you'd like to update, and once it begins, the process is seamless. Perfect Updater handles it from within the application, without bouncing you to a Web site, as Device Doctor does. And it even creates a system restore point for you automatically--a useful thing that's all too easy to neglect to do manually.

I had two minor issues with Perfect Updater: first, it mis-identified one current drivers as out of date, and then it attempted to install a driver for my HP printer that my Windows 7 PC wouldn't support. The company says this is likely an isolated problem with its driver analysis, and is looking into it. It correctly identified 21 out-of-date drivers, though.

These issues kept Perfect Updater from performing perfectly, but aside from that, it was pretty darn close.