Driver Store on Anything About IT

Exporting Windows Driver Store Information into Excel

Wed, 02 Feb 2011 21:16:51 +0000

To obtain detailed information about a particular driver that is prestaged within the Windows 7 driver store, you can run the following command.

Dism /online /get-driverinfo /driver: <path to driver inf file>

Now there is quite a lot of interesting information in here, imagine you are working on a Windows 7 project and you want to know if a particular device is supported by the Windows 7 build in drivers. Of course you can do a bulk export of all the drivers into text files (as explained in this earlier post) but wouldn’t it be nice if we could just have all the information consolidated in one Excel file or database?

Inside the Windows 7 Driver Store–Part 2

Tue, 04 Jan 2011 01:03:03 +0000

Since I wrote my previous post Inside the Windows 7 Driver Store, I continued exploring the content of the Driver Store. The results are as following:

Classes & Unique Hardware IDs

 **Windows 7 Enterprise 32 Bit** **Windows 7 Enterprise 64 Bit** **Class Description** **Hardware Ids** **Class Description** **Hardware Ids** 61883 Device Class 4 61883 Device Class 4 AVC Devices 15 AVC Devices 15 Batteries 11 Batteries 11 Bluetooth Radios 69 Bluetooth Radios 69 Computer 2 Computer 1 Disk drives 31 Disk drives 31 Display adapters 499 Display adapters 500 DVD/CD-ROM drives 5 DVD/CD-ROM drives 5 Floppy disk drives 12 Floppy disk drives 12 Floppy drive controllers 1 Floppy drive controllers 1 Human Interface Devices 204 Human Interface Devices 205 IDE ATA/ATAPI controllers 87 IDE ATA/ATAPI controllers 87 IEEE 1284.4 compatible printer 100 IEEE 1284.4 compatible printer 100 IEEE 1284.4 devices 118 IEEE 1284.4 devices 118 IEEE 1394 Bus host controllers 17 IEEE 1394 Bus host controllers 17 Imaging devices 594 Imaging devices 594 Keyboards 136 Keyboards 136 Media Center Extender 4 Media Center Extender 4 Medium Changer devices 225 Medium Changer devices 225 Memory devices 1 Memory devices 1 Mice and other pointing devices 104 Mice and other pointing devices 104 Microsoft Common Controller For Windows Class 6 Microsoft Common Controller For Windows Class 6 Modems 3935 Modems 2695 Monitors 1797 Monitors 1797 Multifunction adapters 52 Multifunction adapters 52 Network adapters 3903 Network adapters 3641 Network Protocol 6 Network Protocol 6 Other devices 2 Other devices 2 PCMCIA adapters 98 PCMCIA adapters 98 Portable Devices 64 Portable Devices 64 Ports (COM & LPT) 100 Ports (COM & LPT) 92 Printers 2151 Printers 2151 Processors 55 Processors 55 SBP2 IEEE 1394 Devices 1 SBP2 IEEE 1394 Devices 1 SD host adapters 12 SD host adapters 12 Security Devices 4 Security Devices 4 Sensors 1 Sensors 1 Smart Card Filter 1 Smart Card Filter 1 Smart card readers 22 Smart card readers 22 Smart cards 4 Smart cards 4 Sound, video and game controllers 437 Sound, video and game controllers 413 Storage controllers 2085 Storage controllers 2086 Storage volume shadow copies 1 Storage volume shadow copies 1 Storage Volumes 1 Storage Volumes 1 System devices 1479 System devices 1448 Tape drives 303 Tape drives 303 Transfer Cable Devices 40 Transfer Cable Devices 40 Universal Serial Bus controllers 530 Universal Serial Bus controllers 530 Unknown device class 17 Unknown device class 17 Windows SideShow 6 Windows SideShow 6 **Total** **19'352** **Total** **17'789**

Manufacturers

The below table shows those Manufacturers that have the most unique Hardware IDs within the Driver Store. I had to do some data consolidation, as some vendors seem to use several ways for writing their company name within the INF file. (Some room for improvement here).

Windows 7 Device Installation Without Administrative Rights

Fri, 31 Dec 2010 02:00:07 +0000

This year I have had the opportunity to speak with many customers about Windows 7. One topic that came up in almost every discussion was about how mobile users can install their local devices without having to grant them local administrator rights. With previous versions of Windows (NT 4, Windows 2000 and XP) many companies ended up in granting their mobile users local administrator or power user rights, just because they needed to have the flexibility of installing drivers for their local devices. While in the past the need for installing a local device was primarily for local printers, nowadays where people use multiple devices there is also a demand to support mobile phones, headsets and cameras.

ToolTip: DriverStore Explorer

Tue, 28 Dec 2010 16:12:59 +0000

In my previous blog post Inside the Windows 7 Driver Store I explained how to retrieve information about the Windows in-box drivers. Beside the in-box drivers the driver store also hosts the drivers installed via Windows Update or the native OEM provided driver installation package.

The Driver Store Explorer utility provides a GUI interface for the Windows Driver Store. So instead of using pnputil (read Vijay’s post for details) or dism, the Driver Store Explorer allows you to list 3rd party drivers that are already installed within the driver store. Furthermore the tool also allows you to prestage, install or delete drivers from the driver store. The below screen shot is taken from a fresh Windows 7 installation running within a Citrix XenDesktop 5 environment.

Inside the Windows 7 Driver Store

Tue, 28 Dec 2010 15:37:19 +0000

The driver store is a trusted location of inbox and third-party driver packages. This means that before a driver can be installed it must first be injected into the driver store, this process is called staging. Today I want to take a closer look at what is inside the driver store specifically the drivers that are included within Windows 7. The driver store is located under C:\Windows\System32\Driverstore.

To get list of all drivers installed (staged) within the driver store, open an elevated command prompt and enter the following command:

Windows 7 - Driverstore size

Sun, 01 Feb 2009 11:38:51 +0000

When it comes to OS deployment the size of the image to some extend does matter. Windows by default comes with a large set of plug and play device drivers that are included within the operating system installation sources.

Prestaged drivers in Windows Vista and Windows 7 are located under C:\Windows\system32\Driverstore.

If you run the following command against your mounted Windows 7 image file, you get a list of all PnPdrivers included within the Driverstore.