List of All Installed Windows Drivers and How to See It

Apr 1
11:08

2015

Rossy Guide

Rossy Guide

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Drivers aren’t something that you need to be terribly worried about anymore unless you’re a gamer, but when you are troubleshooting a problem it can be useful to see what you have installed.

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For the most part,List of All Installed Windows Drivers and How to See It Articles you can just use the drivers included in Windows Update, but if you have a high performance PC with a good graphics card, you’re probably going to want to install the latest graphics drivers. Listing out the drivers can also quickly tell you what version you currently have installed, which is pretty useful.

How to List All Installed Windows Drivers:

Luckily there’s a built-in utility that will spit out a list of all the installed drivers, and it couldn’t be simpler. All you need to do is open up a command prompt and type in the following:

driverquery

That will give you a list of the drivers and date associated to each. If you want more information, like the actual driver file, you can use the /V command.

driverquery /V

There are a number of other options that will spit out the results to a CSV file format or show you which drivers are signed. You can use /? as the command to see how they work.

Using InstalledDriversList:

If you aren’t a big fan of the command line, you can use the freeware InstalledDriversList utility from NirSoft. The great thing about NirSoft is that he never bundles crapware or spyware with any of his utilities.

Once you download and extract the utility from the zip file, you can simply run it to see all the details. You can double-click on anything in the list to see more information, and there are a lot of extra columns of information that show everything from the path of the driver to the version and date.

The green icons indicate that Windows is currently using that driver, while yellow means that it is installed but not activated. If you see a red icon, that means that there’s probably an issue with that driver, which can be a great way to troubleshoot.

View the List of Installed Drivers the Easy Way:

If you are having issues with your computer it’s often necessary to check the versions of drivers that you have installed on your system, especially when the problem is with a display driver, which always seem to have the most issues.

There’s a really simple little utility called DriverView that you can use without even installing (just unzip it and run) that will quickly give you a list of which drivers are installed, the version numbers and other useful information.

Once you launch the utility, it’s fairly self explanatory…

If you double-click on the driver you can see all the details.

You can also choose to save the list of drivers in a number of different formats. Text format would be useful if you wanted to paste it into a forum thread while asking for assistance.

Alternatively, you can generate an HTML report of all the items or just the selected ones.

It could be useful to generate a report when your system is working optimally that you could later compare against if you have issues with driver updates in the future. Note that system restore helps out with that as well…

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