How to check loaded drivers?

Paul Black · 23 Jun 2022

Hello @MaloK,

MaloK said:

It does not apply to portable devices . . .

I always treat these devices (printers / scanners / faxes) independently.

Sorry, I am a bit confused.

Are you saying that Printers, Scanners, Faxes, Mobiles, External HDD's, External SSD's, USB Controller etc, DO need to be plugged in/attached?

MaloK · 23 Jun 2022

Standard removable storage is ok,

You might get things removed if your iphone is not connected if you are using Itunes and other software drivers will be removed, like Virtual DVD drivers etc...

At some point it is not bad to run it because it removes a lot of superseded drivers, But it's worthless on new installations or machines that have not upgraded much.

I most of the time use it before doing a backup of vital drivers from a machine I'm going to erase.

I use it a lot in corp environment and have never had much problem with it.

cornetto · 23 Jul 2022

MaloK said:

this CMD removes all drivers not in uses from the Driverstore. I use it before exporting drivers for recovery and it lightens a lot the Drivers Backup size.
<snipped CMD script>

It's a crude way to do it but it does recover lots of space.
If you have Printers / scanners or any USB controller, make sure that everything is online before running that.

This article recommends some tools that will detect and display old/unused drivers and allow the user to review them and select which ones to remove. I wonder if that might be a useful approach rather than your script that removes all of them without review:
8 Ways to Detect And Remove Old, Unused or Hidden Device Drivers • Raymond.CC

Joe123456 · 12 Aug 2022

Just wanted to chime in that i now use windows's built-in "useless drivers remover" feature

I use this every time i install a new driver. Amd has new game-ready drivers (not official ones) every week or so so this comes in very handy, tho it does not seem to remove all old drivers, for example right now i have 2 amdafd.inf, tho their major versions are different (21.30.0.1000 and 22.20.0.0) so maybe that's why the tool is scared to delete em cuz it considers em different due to the major versions being different