Question Is there any paid-for private expert IT help to be had from anywhere on the planet?

[|galen|]

I've got a question about Driver details that no-one on Microsoft Community, Microsoft Learn, nor Stack Exchange : Super User can answer. Is there any paid-for private expert consultancy available anywhere I could turn to?

Basically I've found three separate Command Prompt commands to fetch Driver details and I can't find information anywhere explaining how they correlate both with each other and with Device Manager.

 

[helpstar]

what´s your problem?

 

[|galen|]

@helpstar

The

"Get-WmiObject Win32_PnPSignedDriver | select devicename, driverversion"

Power Shell command gives me a list of 228 Drivers, with their 'names' and version details. Device Manager only lists 193 Drivers (as best as I can count). Only 160 of the 193 Drivers listed in Device Manager show up on this Power Shell list, and who knows what those extra 35 are that make up the rest of the difference.

The

"dism /online /export-driver /destination:C:\OldDrivers"

Administrator Command Prompt command produces files for 245 Drivers, which is about 20 more than with the Power Shell command. I can't find any details in these files it produces that match at all with any details given in Device Manager nor with that list produced by that Power Shell command; not even the Driver Version details in these files match with the Driver Versions given in Device Manager.

The

"driverquery/v"

command in Command Prompt produces a list of 460 drivers. The only details I can find in this list that match with any of the above are that some of the file-paths given in this list seem to match with the various files that are listed in the "Driver Details" Sub-Window found in the "Driver" tab of the Properties Window for some of the Drivers in Device Manager.

In summary: the first command produces more entries than Device Manager has listings for, and not all of Device Manager's listings are in that longer list, i.e., Device Manger gives X+Y number of entries with no Z number of entries, the command gives X+Z number of entries with no Y number of entries, where Z>Y; the second command produces even more entries than the first one, with no details that can be matched to the first list nor to Device Manager; the third list produces about twice as many entries as the first list, some of which details can be matched with Device Manager.

 

[helpstar]

sorry, still don´t getting what´s really wrong with your system or why you wanna compare driver lists

 

[|galen|]

@helpstar

I can tell you reason behind all this if you want to know, of course. I want to get a list of all the drivers on my PC together with the Driver Version details for all of them. Then, I'm going to Clean-Install the OS. Then, after re-installing everything, I want to be able to check that all of the drivers are up-to-date by checking them against this list I'm trying to make, you see?

It sounds like you can't help, or else you would've replied with more than "why are you doing this?", in which case you've just wasted a lot of time for me in explaining all of this to you when I could've been getting on with other things.

 

[Corwin65]

@helpstar

I can tell you reason behind all this if you want to know, of course. I want to get a list of all the drivers on my PC together with the Driver Version details for all of them. Then, I'm going to Clean-Install the OS. Then, after re-installing everything, I want to be able to check that all of the drivers are up-to-date by checking them against this list I'm trying to make, you see?

It sounds like you can't help, or else you would've replied with more than "why are you doing this?", in which case you've just wasted a lot of time for me in explaining all of this to you when I could've been getting on with other things.

Great way to motivate people to volunteer their time to help you.

When trying to help someone we always asks questions and go through a checklist whether it's formal or just ad-hoc.

That was why you were asked a question.

 

[COLGeek]

Civility is a requirement for all members. Understanding the "why" can help with the "how".

Mistreating those trying to help is a serious faux pas in regards to forum decorum.

Drivers change all the time, on different schedules. The comparison noted above will only be current at a single point in time.

 

[Eximo]

Or you could just get the drivers for your system the same way everyone does. By installing the recommendations from the manufacturers of the hardware. Plug and Play basically took care of anything complicated a few decades ago.

Unless I was doing something very technical with external hardware, possibly not even PC related, then I might care about specific revisions or hardware specific drivers. But then I would also know where they came from in the first place.