How to view all installed drivers and their location in windows?

👤 Diwas Poudel 🕒 01 Nov 2023 📁 TECH

A driver is a software component that acts as an intermediary between the operating system and hardware devices of the computer. It helps hardware devices work properly with the operating system. Sometimes, there is a need to view the installed drivers and their locations on your computer, and in this article, I will demonstrate how to do this in the Windows operating system.

People prefer to view the installed location of drivers to:

Troubleshoot problems related to drivers.
To back up your drivers.
To find out potentially malicious drivers that may have been installed.
To uninstall drivers and having driver location make it easier to do.
To Remove unused drivers.
To learn about your system.

Here I will show you two methods to view the installed location of drivers and they are:

Using msinfo32

msinfo32 stands for "Microsoft System Information" and this is a built-in tool that provides detailed information about your computer system which includes hardware, software resources, software environment, etc. To check the driver's location follow these steps.

Press the Windows + R key from the keyboard
Then type msinfo32 and press the Enter button. This will open the msinfo32.
Under System Summary on the left, expand Software Environment and click on System Drivers
Then on the right you will find all the drivers installed on your computer.
To find the location, you have to look at the File Column which gives the actual location of drivers installed corresponding to the driver listed in the "Name" column.

fig. check the installed driver location using msinfo32

In my case, it is under c:\windows\system32\drivers. You can go to this path and view the drivers.

Note that c:\windows\system32\drivers is the default path of your driver if you have not changed its location.

Using Command Line

For this, we will use the driver query command. This command is used to query and display information about device drivers.

So let's follow the below steps to view the driver installed.

Press the Windows + R key from the keyboard
Then type cmd and press the Enter button. This will open the command prompt.
Then type the below command:

driverquery /FO LIST /V

This command will list down and display all the installed drivers and their properties in tabular format.