In general terms, a driver is a software layer between the operating system and your computer’s hardware configuration. Its task is to translate the commands coming from the operating system into a language understandable to the device and to set the feedback between them. Our experts tell you how to get and see full information about the drivers installed in Windows 10.
Viewing drivers through Device Manager
All information on the computer hardware configuration, along with management tools are collected in the Device Manager.
Open the “Start” sub-menu with the “Win+X” key combination. Open the item shown in the screenshot.
In the Manager window find the group you are interested in and expand it to see the devices it contains. You can call a context menu for each. Let’s take the keyboard as an example and open the “Properties” item.
Switch to the “Driver” tab. At the top of the window, under the name of the device there is general information about the manufacturer, development date, software version and digital signature. Clicking the “Details” button you can get the data on the location of the driver components.
The window that opens contains their general list, with their name and location in the operating system. Highlighting a specific file, view its characteristics.
Going to the tab “Information” in the properties window you can get even more information about the driver. Expanding the drop-down menu, indicated by the arrow, you will get a long list of parameters, starting with a general description.
Msinfo32 – System Info
The msinfo32 utility has been part of Microsoft operating systems since Windows 98, but is rarely used. You can get almost complete data about your computer, including a list of installed drivers.
Call the “Run” window using the “Win+R” keyboard shortcut. Type “msinfo32” in the text field. Start the execution of the entered command by pressing “OK” or the Enter key.
The “Components” section contains information about hardware configuration and is similar in structure to the device manager. Expanding the “Input” group for example, you can see the characteristics of the keyboard. For the driver the path, where it is located in the system, the software version, the file size and the installation date are displayed.
The “Software Environment” section lists the main characteristics of the operating system. The item shown in the screenshot contains information about standard drivers in Windows.
After opening the “File” menu in the line of control commands you can see two items, represented by arrows. The “Save” option creates the full copy of the collected information. The data is transferred to a file with the extension NFO, which is opened in the program msinfo32. “Export” makes it possible to write down the characteristics of a particular device in a plain text document.
View drivers on Windows 10 through the command line
You can get the entire list of drivers installed in Windows, using the command line.
In the additional menu of Start button use the marked item to start the console with administrative privileges.
Type the command “driverquery”. The window shows a full list of all drivers, sorted alphabetically.
For convenient studying it may be copied by means of hot keys. Select all content in the command line window with “Ctrl+A”. Copy the information by pressing “Ctrl+C”, and paste it into Notepad with “Ctrl+V.
Applying additional keys allows to output the detailed information. The command “driverquery /si” is shown as an example. It opens the list of only signed drivers. A full list of additional parameters can be obtained by typing “driverquery /?”.
View drivers on Windows 10 using PowerShell
PowerShell is developed by Microsoft and is promoted as a modern alternative to the CMD console. It uses object-oriented scripts in addition to support for old commands.
Open the Start button’s advanced menu. Run PowerShell in elevated privileges.
Enter command “Get-WindowsDriver -on
The typed command takes a few seconds to process, after that it is presented in the form shown in the screenshot. Array of acquired data does not fit into default 3000 lines. To study it from the screen you will need to increase the output size in advance in the Powershell settings.
Let’s make a small improvement in the command by providing the output of the collected information to a text file. Type “Get-WindowsDriver -on
In the search window, enter the full name of the file, taking into account the extension. Number “2” marks the field with available options. You can open the document for study or go to the system32 directory and move it to a more convenient location on your hard drive.
If you copy the path marked in the screenshot to the address bar of Explorer you can directly open the configuration file of the selected driver.
Viewing drivers on Windows 10Side programs
Third-party programs allow getting information in a more graphical form.
AIDA64
AIDA is designed to collect and display detailed information about your computer. The program is paid, but with a 30 day trial period.
The section marked with an arrow is similar to Windows’ Device Manager. The tree structure of your hardware configuration is displayed in the upper part of the right window. The information about the selected device in it is displayed at the bottom of the. For the driver you can see a general description, release date, vendor and version.
The “Operating system” section contains all the characteristics of the Windows installed on the computer. The item marked with an arrow on the screenshot contains the same information as in the Msinfo32 program. Here you can see the complete list of system drivers.
Built-in report wizard allows you to save data to TXT or HTML file for further detailed study.
InstalledDrivers
A free utility from a large collection developed by Israeli programmer Nir Sofer. You can download it from the official site of the developer. InstalledDriver is distributed
Once launched, the utility displays a list of drivers in a window. There are colored marks next to each driver name with arrows. Green indicator means that the driver is used by the system. The items that are installed, but not currently active, are marked in yellow. You can get more detailed information in the context menu. The “Properties” item opens a separate window with the properties of the selected driver. The group of items marked with “3” allows you to create reports in TXT or HTML format.
The screenshot shows the properties after clicking on the “Properties” button in the context menu.
DriverView
Another utility from the same developer, which collects information with more details. You can download it from the official NirSoft website as a ZIP archive. The Russian language is also downloaded as a separate file.
Once launched, DriverView analyzes the state of the system and displays a list of drivers currently in use. For detailed information choose the interesting element and call the context menu by the right button of the mouse.
Let’s see what you do with the items marked with a number.
“Select Column” opens a menu where you can check the items of interest. The buttons to the right of the selection area are intended for sorting the order in which the columns of information are displayed. After adjusting the main window of the program in this way, press “OK”.
The “Properties” item contains data about the selected driver collected by the utility. To view the information DriverView can save the information to the local report files. Similar to the above mentioned applications, both TXT and HTML formats are available.
To sum up
The methods described by our experts allow you to see which drivers are installed in Windows 10 with varying degrees of detail. It remains only to choose the most suitable one and proceed to examination of the collected information.
