SysPrep in Depth – Part 7 – Obtaining Your Hardware Drivers

Finding your drivers for sysprep

-Using software to find them

There are all sorts of software out there to extract drivers from your current system as long as the device is currently install. These products can be life savers when you have a device that was installed and you have no clue where the drivers came from originally. One of my preferred pieces of software is DoubleDriver. DoubleDriver is still in “Beta” stage and might not be in development anymore since the last release was quite awhile ago. DoubleDriver has extracted about 90% of the all the drivers I have ever needed to find, but does seem to have issues finding drivers that use .net (like ATI drivers) and a few other other drivers companies drivers. When DoubleDriver fails for me I pull out DriverMax and let it take a shot at my drivers. Thinking back to the instances I have used DriverMax it makes me wonder why I don’t switch the order in which I personally use the two products as DriverMax seems to have a better success rate, but we all get stuck in our ways. DriverMax is another free driver backup product that does a great job of finding drivers and being able to back them up, and since it is still being developed it has a high success rate then DoubleDrive. Pick the product you like the most, but I prefer using both to make sure you get everything you need. If both products are good at what they do, why not use both products and verify you get the drivers the first time.

Stopping Malware From Installing; The Unsupported Yet Entertaining Way

Here is a quick little story about malware and a very unsupported but extremely effective way of stopping malware. Please don’t ask me for help if you try this and don’t attempt this if you don’t understand the implications of doing it.

About a year ago I was working at someones house removing all kinds of malware from their computer. I was seeing folders all over that were suspicious looking to me but all the scanners I could find at the time claimed the computer was clean. Well you should never trust the scanners when popp-ups are just popping up all over when you log in.  Anyways, I kept looking around and started questioning the folders I had found and using ProcExp I decided that it would be a good idea to remove the programs. So I stopped the running programs, deleted the files and did everything I could to manually verify the computer was clean.