I'm the developer of Snappy Driver Installer.
I used to work on DriverPack Solution but I wasn't happy with the fact it was written in JavaScript which means that it's very slow, depends on version of IE and I also didn't like that users had to deal with changing their homepage, OEM logo, software being forced down their throat. For my part, I tired to make these things easy to disable but even though I made major contributions to the project, I wasn't successful in convincing making it disabled by default. I haven’t been involved in the project for a long time, and now that I have my own project(Snappy Driver Installer), I no longer have to support DriverPack Solution.
Snappy Driver Installer isn't just a fork. It’s a complete rewrite from scratch and was initially supposed to be a new version of DriverPack Solution but I decided to split off from it so that it wouldn't end up being filled with adware. Since I left DriverPack Solution, they have no developers who understand how driver ranking algorithm works so no one works on improving it. People keep complaining about adware, scripting errors, incorrect driver picking such as installing touchpad drivers on desktops but the only things that are changing are GUI and adware being updated to newest version. The known issues aren't likely to be addressed because the team is too busy optimizing the website in order to maximize profit from users downloading DPS and installing adware.
Driverpacks are being put together by SamLab. He also releases his own SamDrivers that includes both Snappy Driver Installer and DriverPack Solution. It should be noted that his version of DriverPack Solution has most adware disabled by default but at this point I wouldn't bother with it anyway because DPS is left too far behind SDI in terms of how it picks driver for installation. DPS can no longer pick the correct driver on its own and has to rely on markers which are put by SamLab and some trickery to force DPS into installing the correct driver, but it doesn't works all the time. I wish SamLab wouldn't have to spend so much effort on making sure that his driverpacks work with DPS but for now he has to support the lowest common denominator.
Snappy Driver Installer is written in C/C++ which makes it fast, compact, standalone.
Size
DPS - 34 MB (291 files)
SDI - 1.3 MB (42 files) Without localization and themes - 1 MB(one file).
Indexing time
DPS - 280 secs (4:40)
SDI - 19 secs (13 secs on indexing and 6 secs on compressing)
Start up time
DPS - 10 secs
SDI - 0.5 sec
I know there were some issues with updating via torrents but it should be fixed by now. It should start up much faster now and also you can change port in settings.cfg.
If you have issues with driver installation, you can post logs so that I can look into it.
