Configuring Windows 7 (Training Kit) - Part 25. This training kit is designed for IT professionals who operate in enterprise enviroments that use Windows 7 as a desktop operating system. You should have at least one year of experience in the IT field, as well as experience implementing and administering any Windows client operating system in a networked environment. | FIGURE 4-16 MSinfo32 displays general system information. FIGURE 4-17 MSinfo32 displays conflicts sharing information. Lesson 1 Managing Device Drivers and Devices CHAPTER 4 213 You can access information about specific devices CD-ROM sound device display and so on by expanding Components. Arguably the most useful of the selections available as far as diagnosis is concerned is Problem Devices which lists devices that cannot start have no drivers installed or have other problems. When you expand Software Environment you can click System Drivers. This displays a list of kernel drivers and you can determine whether a driver has started. You can use the Find What box to find a driver by its file name or description. Testing Drivers with Driver Verifier Monitor Not all driver problems are due to conflicts. Sometimes devices do not work properly or STOP errors occur but no conflict information is shown and disabling other drivers does not resolve the problems. As with any software installation you can use Reliability Monitor to determine when the installation occurred and whether reliability was affected adversely but this tool does not diagnose device driver problems specifically. Windows 7 provides the Driver Verifier Monitor command-line tool which lets you monitor device drivers to detect illegal function calls or actions that might corrupt the system. It can subject the drivers to various stresses and tests to find incorrect behavior. Figure 4-18 shows the Driver Verifier Monitor tool and the verifier command. The volatile flag lets you start verification of any driver without rebooting even if Driver Verifier Monitor is not already running and you can start the verification of a driver that is already loaded. These improvements introduced in Windows Vista significantly reduce the number of reboots required. This saves time and lets you use Driver Verifier Monitor to monitor a driver while you attach and remove devices. FIGURE 4-18 The Driver Verifier Monitor tool .
