When you’re troubleshooting a suspected device driver problem, you can find detailed information about specific drivers being used in a Windows XP system by going to Device Manager, selecting the device from the list, and drilling down to the device’s properties sheet. While this technique is fine when you’re looking for
information on one specific device driver, it’s not very efficient when you’re
interested in information about a number of device drivers—it’s just too time
consuming.

To ease the task of gathering information on a number of
device drivers, you can use a tool called Driver Query (Driverquery.exe). When
you run this tool, Driver Query provides you with a detailed list of all the
device drivers installed on a local system, or on any system on a network—and
using it is easy. Here’s how:

  1. Open a Command Prompt window.
  2. Type Driverquery on the command line.

The results are displayed in a table format in the Command
Prompt window. If you want to perform more detailed analysis, you can direct
the Driver Query to save the results in a CSV file so you can open them in a
spreadsheet application such as Excel. To do so, type the following on the command line:

Driverquery  /v  /fo  csv  > drivers.csv

Note: This tip applies only
to Windows XP Professional.

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