Driver 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?

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.

ToolTip: BlueScreenView

Tue, 04 Aug 2009 21:56:21 +0000

Anyone who uses Windows has seen at least once a BSOD (Blue Screen of Death). Even Bill Gates had to deal with it (watch this video). NirSoft has released a utility called BlueScreenView that scans all the minidump files that are being created when a BSOD occurs and displays all information about these crashes.

The utility is FREE and does not need to be installed. A detailed description of BlueScreenView can be found here