System administrators sometimes need to be able to produce a list of drivers that are installed on their system.  Driveryquery.exe is an excellent command line tool from Microsoft to accomplish this.  This tool will give you a report on all of the current device drivers that are loaded on your system.  The command line tool also gives you several options on the information that it will display.  Below is a screenshot that shows all of the options available for running Driverquery.exe.

Driverquery.exe From Microsoft

Driverquery.exe From Microsoft

 

Examples Of Driverquery.exe

This example will pipe the information from driverquery.exe to a txt file on the drive.
C:\driverquery.exe > C:\driverqueyr.txt

This example will format the output into a list view.
C:\driverquery.exe /fo list

This example will turn on verbose output for more information.
C:\driverquery.exe /V

This example will show drivers that are currently running.
C:\driverquery.exe /v | findstr Running

 

 

Its amazing how quickly we can forget small options in operating systems that we no longer normally use.  I came across one example tonight when working on an XP machine for a friend.  I had to do the song and dance of removing the old hard drive from the computer and putting it in an external drive.  I then hooked up to their old XP machine and quickly realized I did not have a security tab under folder properties.  This was essential in order to change security on the files in order to copy them over.  It took me a little bit to remember the below steps in XP to make the security tab visible on a home machine.

1.  Launch Windows Explorer
2.  Open up folder options under the tools on the menu bar.
3.  Click on the view tab.
4.  Under advanced settings uncheck “use simple file sharing (recommended).
5.  Click OK.

There is one last very important piece of information that you might over look.  In order to see the security tab you also have to be logged into the machine with administrator privileges.

 

PAL version 2.0 has officially been released on Codeplex by Clint Huffman.  If you are not familiar with the project PAL is short for Performance Analysis Of Logs Tool.  The tool reads performance monitor counter logs and analyzes them using known threshold limits.  Some of the features of 2.0 are an easy GUI interface for creating threshold files, HTML basted reports, and performance analysis that changes based on the computers role.

The main change in PAL 2.0 is that it is based on Powershell.  You can run it on any current Microsoft Operating System that has PowerShell v2.0, .NET Framework 3.5 SP1, and Microsoft chart controls for .NET Framework 3.5 installed.

If you are an IT PRO or just somebody interested in performance analysis please check out this latest release.  I guarantee that you will not be disappointed.  If you like the tool please drop the Codeplex site and let Clint know that you appreciate the tool.

PAL Codeplex  Site
http://pal.codeplex.com/

© 2011 Server Ninjas Suffusion theme by Sayontan Sinha