New
#11
I discovered another benefit to using DriverStore Explorer. Let me explain....
Initially, I was using PNPUTIL or DISM to export the drivers from my systems and saving a copy of these.
In the event that I reinstall Windows from scratch, I would load those drivers back into the newly installed Windows. The problem was that with such huge driver stores it would take a LONG time to install all those drivers.
To work around this, I ended up injecting the drivers into my unattended install and sysprep images. This made things considerably faster but had the downside of having a lot of maintenance overhead for my unattended and sysprep images.
Now, using this utility, my driver store is nice and small and the drivers install very quickly. I now no longer feel the need to inject the drivers into all my images.
I have to wonder how I was not aware of this utility previously. It also makes me wonder how many other hidden gems there are out there that I am oblivious to.
Kari - I have to echo your sentiments. I prefer to use native tools wherever possible. But this brings up a question for question:
I'm wondering if you or Ed, or anyone else knows of any way to manually create a USB flash drive that allows you to choose from multiple Windows installation images. At the moment I'm using a utility called "WinSetupFromUSB". This has allowed me to create a single thumb drive that has both x86 and x64 Windows 10 installations as well as several unattended install images and sysprep install images. I'm just curious to know if anyone knows of a way to accomplish this manually or with native Microsoft tools.
Okay, time to start playing with MDT now....