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Check system driver status with driverquery

It seems that Microsoft has taken complaints from administrators seriously, as it has added several new command-line utilities to Windows XP.

One of them, called driverquery, which is useful for checking the status of system drivers, is included in Windows XP Professional edition.

The primary task of driverquery is to display all drivers installed on the system. When you run the utility, you'll receive a list of the drivers, their short name, description, driver type, and link date and time. You can add the /v parameter to get detailed information about drivers or the /si parameter to get information about signed and unsigned drivers on the system. This can be very useful.

Listing all drivers from the remote system makes the utility even more useful. Everything you can do with a local system, you can also do on a remote system by adding the /s parameter.

The key feature of driverquery is the ability it provides to define the output type. By default, the utility displays all drivers in table form. In order to redirect the output to a text file, you may want to choose CVS format, which you can easily view with Excel or any other spreadsheet application.