Sean: In this video, we're going to look at device management in Windows 10. The tools in device management for Windows 10 are the same as they are for Windows 7, so you should be familiar with this already. We always start off in the same place in Windows 10, we start off with device manager, and the way that we get to that in Windows 10 is simply to right click the Windows icon, and select device manager. When we look at device manager, we want to make sure that we don't see any exclamation marks to show that there is something that's not necessarily configured properly, or red x's to show that either something is disabled, that, that might be something that we've chosen to do, or something that's simply not installed properly. Now when we look at a product, and we'll look at the display adaptor here, and you can see that this is a virtual machine, so it says the hyper V video rather than the physical graphics adaptor. If we double click on it, and we look at its properties, we expect to see that the device is working properly, and then when we look at the driver, we want to look at a few things here. We want to see who's provided it, and predominantly there's two different types of driver that you're going to have. You're going to have the OEM driver, now that's the driver that's been put on by the manufacturer of the equipment. Now that could be HP, it could be IBM, it could be Toshiba, it could be Sony, it could be anyone, and that will be a driver that they have taken, and modified and maybe put some extra functionality in there. Or you could have the generic driver, because it doesn't matter which manufacturer of, of laptop of desktop you buy, the internal components are going to be, in the case of a video adaptor like Intel or AMD or NVidia, so you could use the generic driver or you could use the OEM driver.

So we have a look at who's made the driver. We have a look at its date. We have a look at its version, and we have a look at something called the signer. Now if you're using a 64-bit operating system, which I think you will be, then driver signing is mandated. And what driver signing means is that you can verify not only where the driver came from, but also whether it's been modified or not. Now if we wanted to see a bit more, we can click on the driver details, and then we get to how do we update the driver. Now if I update the driver, there are a few ways that I could do this. If I choose to search automatically for drivers, then what it would do is it would go to Microsoft's update website, and it would then see if there is a new driver from there, and then offer you the ability to download it and install it. I can point it, again directly, because this isn't going to look anywhere, and if I wanted to do it manually, so browse, then there's two ways that you can do this. I could either have a folder full of drivers or I could say let me pick from a list of available drivers on my computer. And if I do say that, and it finds a load of drivers, this is where it's looking. So if I go into my file explorer, and I go into my C, Windows, down to my system32, and down to something called my driver store, in there is a file repository.

So let's just view that as a list, and you can see that this is full of drivers. Now the drivers that are in here are the drivers that are included with the operating system, or drivers that have been added in through a Windows 10 feature update. And I think the key thing here that's very, very important, so let's just minimise that for a moment, and let's also just minimise that and go back to updating the driver. If I browse and, and I decide to have a folder where I've downloaded drivers and stored them, then I need to be an administrator in order to install that driver. But if I pick from a list of available drivers on the computer, and we know that it's looking at this driver store folder, then I don't need to be an administrator. I only need to be a user, and an administrator can add drivers into that driver store by using a command line utility called PnPUtil. So they could add all the drivers into the driver store before anyone wants them. And the really good thing about that is it's not gonna claim any resources in Windows. The drivers aren't installed. They're not running in the background. They're not draining your system. So we have options as to how we want to add drivers. Now I'm going to, for this demonstration, pick from a list and I am going to say take the virtual display adaptor. And just before I do that, we'll see that it's currently called the Microsoft hyper V video driver. We'll say next, we've got a warning here because obviously it's not necessarily the right driver, but I'm going to say yes anyway. It's going to update the driver and we can see that we have virtual display adaptor. Now what we can also see once we've updated the driver is that this button called rollback becomes live, and the rollback button only is available if you've updated the driver.

What the rollback button offers you is the ability to go to the one previous version of the driver without having to uninstall and reinstall the device. So it's very important you understand that if the button's greyed out, then it means that you have not updated the driver at any point. And if you started at version A of a driver, and then you went to version B and to C, and to D, you could only go back one previous version with rollback. And that kind of makes sense, because you're going to assume that each iteration of the driver before the one that you're currently going to go to worked properly. If I click rollback, I would decide why. Well, we're going to say that the previous version of the driver performed better. I'll say yes, and you can see that we've rolled back to the Microsoft hyper V video driver. The last thing that we've got over here is this idea we have a little utility in Windows 10 to check whether all of our drivers are signed. So I'm going to click the Windows button here, and type in the word sigverif, and this runs a little utility called the file signature verification tool. And what this tool will do is it will scan all of your drivers and give you a report of any that aren't signed. Now luckily for me, they're all signed here, but we can go further than that, because we can go into the advance, we can view the log, and we will be able to see all of the drivers that have been installed, and who signed them. Now, I appreciate that this is a virtual machine, and therefore you're seeing that the drivers are signed by Microsoft, but when you go and look on a live machine, you will find that almost all of the drivers are signed by Microsoft.

The reason for this is that a manufacturer produces a driver to go with the hardware, and then produces a certificate. Now they can, after that, get Microsoft's driver testing kit, run the driver and the certificate through the testing kit, export that information, send that to Microsoft, who will then sign it themselves. It goes on the hardware compatibility list, so anyone searching for a driver for that piece of hardware will be able to see this driver and know that it's been approved. Not only by the manufacturer, but by Microsoft too, so don't worry if you see your drivers signed by, signed by Microsoft, rather than the manufacturer. And that is driver management in Windows 10, using device management. We have looked at the device management tool, we've looked at our drivers, we've verified that they are signed, we've updated a driver, we've looked at the different places that we can go to, to update a driver. We have rolled back a driver, and we've used the utility called sigverif to see or to check that all of our drivers have been signed.

Device manager

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