Is it possible to export only active drivers from Windows 10?

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....

Wow, you are really amazing.

Let just say how appreciative I am of your efforts. I may not get a chance to try this until this evening, but I can assure you that I will be up late playing with this .

Thanks once again.

Woo hoo! This issue was a serious pain in my backside. So glad that this has finally been addressed.

Ed, thank you. Apologies for the late response. I completely missed your response until now. In fact, I stumbled upon it by accident just now.

I'll look at that tutorial.

EdTittel said:

Have you ever tried viewing (and perhaps also pruning) your driver collection with a tool such as DriverStore Explorer? I've written a review of this package at Win10.Guru: Toolkit Item: DriverStore Explorer. It will let you eliminate duplicate drivers to reduce the size of the DriverStore. The latest release is v0.10.21 (April 23). Once you load the program, you can simply click the "Select Old Drivers" button, then the "Delete Driver" button and it will delete all old drivers that are not currently in use (if you do try to delete anything that is in use, the program won't delete it unless you manually force it to). Great tool!
HTH,
--Ed--

Driver Store Explorer is very useful. I normally select old drivers and delete the large ones. However, it's not infallible. I recently updated my graphics driver, DSE listed two 500MB AMD GPU driver files but failed to tag the old one. I worked out which was the old one from the driver version and reviewing the installed driver version in Device Manager.