Why I Stopped Using Driver Booster for Printer Drivers — And What I Built Instead

# Why I Stopped Using Driver Booster for Printer Drivers — And What I Built Instead

I used Driver Booster for about three years. On a machine with a GPU, audio interface, and a handful of USB peripherals, it’s fine — it saves time and mostly does what it says. I’m not here to tell you it’s malware or that you should uninstall it immediately.

But for printer drivers, I stopped recommending it. And that failure is what eventually led me to build PrintPro Driver Pro.

What Driver Booster Gets Right and Where It Breaks Down

Driver Booster is built around a simple model: scan your hardware, match device IDs against a driver database, download and install the newest driver it finds. For most hardware, that works. Graphics cards have one driver. Sound chips have one driver. The whole thing is straightforward.

Printers are not like that.

When an HP OfficeJet ships, it comes with a driver package that’s actually five or six components bundled together: the print spooler driver, the WIA scanner driver, the HP Smart communication layer, firmware management, and sometimes a fax component. These components talk to each other. Install only the print driver and the scanner stops existing as far as Windows is concerned — it doesn’t show up in WIA sources, it doesn’t appear in your scanning software, nothing.

Driver Booster matches the print driver component. That’s the part with a hardware ID that Windows and the driver database can match against. The rest of the package has no hardware ID to match against — it’s application software, not driver software in the traditional sense.

The result is a printer that prints but won’t scan. I saw this exact failure on an Epson EcoTank ET-2760 and then again on a Brother MFC-L2710DW. Both times, Driver Booster showed “driver updated successfully.” Both times, the scanner functionality was gone.

The Discontinued Model Problem

The second issue is the one that made me build something different.

Manufacturers support their hardware for a while, then they stop. Canon pulls the Windows 11 driver for a MX series printer. HP archives the full software package for a LaserJet from 2015. Epson stops updating the installer for a WorkForce model that’s been out of production for four years.

When that happens, the driver disappears from the manufacturer’s current download page. And within a few months, it disappears from Driver Booster’s database too, because Driver Booster’s database mirrors manufacturer sources — it’s not an archive.

The HP LaserJet 1020 is the case I get asked about most often. HP released a basic driver for it under Windows 10, but the official full driver package has been effectively unavailable for Windows 11. Driver Booster shows no driver. Windows Update occasionally installs a generic PCL driver that lets the printer communicate but breaks the queue behavior. Users end up on forums from 2019, downloading files from domains they’ve never heard of.

That’s the gap I was trying to solve. I put together an archived driver database specifically for models where the official vendor page is dead or outdated. The goal was that you could put in an HP LaserJet 1020 and get the same complete driver package that used to be on HP’s site, verified against the original file hash, not a repackaged version from a random host.

I built it as a one-time purchase — no subscription, no annual renewal — because printer driver needs don’t scale with time the way security software does. You need the driver once. You shouldn’t pay for it every year.

What PrintPro Driver Pro Actually Does (and Doesn’t Do)

It’s worth being direct about limitations here, because I’m not going to tell you it’s a perfect tool.

PrintPro Driver Pro is specifically built for printers. It doesn’t update your GPU driver, it doesn’t scan your whole system, it won’t help with audio or chipset issues. If you need general driver management, you need a different tool — Driver Booster or something similar is fine for that.

For printer drivers, particularly for models more than three or four years old, it installs the full manufacturer driver package rather than just the print component. That means scanner functionality comes through intact for supported all-in-one models.

For discontinued models where the manufacturer has removed the driver from their current site, the archived database covers a range of HP, Epson, Canon, and Brother models. It doesn’t cover every printer ever made — there are obscure OEM models from smaller manufacturers where I simply don’t have sourced files — but for the common US and EU market printers from the last fifteen years, coverage is solid.

If you’re using Driver Booster for general system maintenance and it’s working for you, I’m not asking you to replace it. But if you’ve got a printer that stopped scanning after a driver update, or an older model where Driver Booster shows nothing available — that’s the scenario this is built for.

The Honest Comparison

Driver Booster: good for keeping current hardware drivers updated across a whole system. Poor for printer-specific driver packages. No coverage for discontinued models.

PrintPro Driver Pro: built only for printers. Full driver packages instead of just print components. Archived database for models no longer on manufacturer sites. Doesn’t handle non-printer hardware at all.

They’re not really competing for the same job.

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