NirSoft’s Nir Sofer has announced the release of InstallerDriversList, the latest addition to his lineup of system information tools.
As you’ll probably guess from its name, the program is a compact portable tool which displays a report on all the device drivers installed on your PC.
InstallerDriversList presented its information in a table, and includes the following details for each driver: Name, Display Name, Description, Startup Type, Type, Error Control, Group, Filename, File Type, File Created/ Modified Time, File Size, Description, Version, Company, and Product Name.
Kernel drivers will also have their base and end memory addresses, memory size and load counts listed.
As usual with NirSoft tools, the table is fully sortable by clicking on any column header, and there are options to save the report as a text or HTML file (just right-click any driver).
Much of the data presented here is very technical, and of little practical use to anyone. But InstalledDriversList can still be useful in exploring what’s happening on your PC.
We ran the program on a test Windows 8.1 computer, for example, clicked the "Group" column header and browsed for "FSFilter" (File System Filter) Drivers. These intercept requests for file access, and can be interesting when troubleshooting slow or unstable systems. We found Windows and antivirus drivers, as expected, but there was also an Anvi Smart Defender 2 driver still installed and running -- even though the program had been removed long ago.
InstallerDriversList won’t appeal to everyone. It’s a relatively technical tool, and if you just need to look at installed system drivers then it's probably easier to use Windows own msinfo32.exe (Software Environment > System Drivers).
The program does display a great deal of information, though, and it could be useful when optimising or troubleshooting a PC. Grab a copy for your own portable toolkit.