Manage Drivers with DriverView

Device drivers can be difficult to stay on top of. Joe Cassels shows a quick and easy way to catalogue them.


The majority of crashes and system freezes are caused by device driver errors. These may be due to using an out of date or inappropriate driver or because there’s a fault with the driver coding. It’s therefore a good idea to keep track of what drivers you have controlling your hardware, along with the companies that produced them and the file dates so you can easily check to see if you’re using the right ones.

You can find out this information for each driver by opening device manager, right clicking a device and choosing properties. To open Device Manager, click Start, Right click My Computer (or just Computer in Vista) and choose Properties. In Vista, you can select Device manager in the left hand pane of the resulting dialog. In XP, choose Hardware, Device Manager. The problem with this approach is that you have to find each device and look up its driver details separately. It’s not easy to get a one stop report of all the drivers that you have installed. This is where DriverView comes in.

You can download DriverView from www.nirsoft.net/utils/driverview.html. It’s a simple zip file containing a standalone executable. Extract the contents and launch the EXE file to run the program. See the walkthrough to find out how to examine individual drivers or to produce a full report in HTML format to save or print.

You’ll notice that you have quite a lot of drivers installed. If you’re looking for a particular one, choose Edit, Find and enter the device that you want. This utility works in exactly the same way as Find in Notepad. Click Find Next to turn up the next instance of your keyword.

You can view the full driver properties as you’d see in Device manager by selecting an item, right clicking it and choosing File Properties. This gives you access to driver rollback and other management tools. If you need to compare driver details with those published on a manufacturer website, double click the device to see full information about that driver, including its version number and the date it was produced.

Examine Driver Information
Use DriverView to produce detailed driver details for your system



1
Download DriverView and extract the zip file to a suitable location. Launch DriverView.exe to start the application. It automatically scans your system and returns a full list of the drivers currently installed.


2
Select a driver from the list and click the Properties button on the toolbar or right click and choose Properties. This opens a dialog box showing all the file details of this driver. You can also right click and choose copy to add this information to the clipboard.


3
To produce a full report on all the system drivers that can be displayed in a web browser, choose View, HTML Report – All Items. This opens in your default browser. You can opt to save or print the page for a permanent record.