The driverquery command generates a list of all hardware drivers installed in Windows. It’s good for giving you a report about installed drivers that you can save for later reference or for investigating the version number of a currently installed driver so that you can make a better decision should you be thinking of updating.
Typed by itself, driverquery just generates a list of drivers that you can scroll through. As usual, the power comes from the options you can add:
- /s. This option lets you specify the name or IP address of a remote computer so that you investigate the drivers it has installed.
- /si. This option shows you the digital signature information for drivers.
- /fo. This is really the key option you’ll use with driverquery. It lets you specify the format in which information is displayed so that you can more effectively save it as a report. After typing /fo add one of the following options: TABLE (the default view), LIST (which lists each driver with all its information one after the other), and CSV (which shows data as comma separated values).
To save a report, you just need to pipe the information to a file instead of displaying it onscreen. To do that add filename.extension to the end of the command. Here’s an example of perhaps the most useful way to use the command:
driverquery /fo CSV > drivers.csv
That queries all drivers, formats the result as comma separated values, and then saves them to a file named drivers.csv. You can then import that CSV file into Excel or another spreadsheet program to see a nicely-formatted report of all your installed drivers.
